> The main problem is that you can't directly get the UTC - TAI difference, > right? If you had that, then you could always convert between them.
That's the crux of the matter. With leap days, I know when to insert one for the next thousand years or so. With leap seconds, I have no clue. Not only that, I have no way to know the number of leap seconds that have happened between now and when the device was made unless I have some communications mechanism to the outside world to tell me. > There is > however a peculiarity of which I am sure you are aware of, you would still > need to know when the leap-seconds occured when doing time-differances over > possible leap-second insertion points. TAI(t2) - TAI(t1) may not be equalent > to UTC(t2) - UTC(t1). Yes. that's the t1 - t2 problem that I'm talking about. And the answer should be identical in both cases (because the leap seconds actually did happen). The math is a lot easier if it is all done in TAI since you don't have to worry about leap seconds complicating the math. Or the possible ambiguity that representing a UTC as a single number can bring with it. Warner _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list [email protected] https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
