Dear Joda experts,
I've been contributing to a long, but ultimately rather fruitless, thread on
the
Sun Java forums about the java.util.Date class, and was hoping that one of your
experts might be able to answer a few questions for me:
1. The published epoch for the Date class is given as 1/1/1970 00:00:00 GMT (I
notice Joda's DateTime epoch specifies Zulu time, which I assume amounts to the
same thing). When exactly is this in terms of UTC, which was not standardized
until 1972? Or do they both in fact use "1/1/1970 00:00:00 UTC proleptic", as
Unix time does?
2. The Joda FAQ states that Joda time does not support leap seconds. Does this
mean that Joda's 'ticker' (and therefore presumably Java's) adjusts for this in
some way, like Unix's; or simply that leap seconds are ignored for the
purposes
of displaying human-readable timestamps?
3. If the answer to Q2 is "the latter", what are the rules for parsing a date
string that might be ambiguous?
4. What was Joda's rationale for publishing its DateTime epoch? I've been
arguing that there was no good reason for Java's Date class to do so, since it
(a) Anchors the date from an instant that people believe they "understand".
(b) Encourages buggy conversion methods written in the mistaken belief that
it's
"simple".
(c) Prevents the epoch from being changed in the event of a new time standard,
or simply to make internal calculations more efficient.
Thanks in advance for any answers.
Winston Gutkowski
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