On Jan 5, 2007, at 20:14, Rob Seaman wrote:
An ISO string is really overkill, MJD can fit into an unsigned short for the next few decades
This isn't really a good idea. Most data formats have been moving away from the compact towards more verbose, from binary to text to XML. There are good reliability and extensibility reasons for this, such as avoiding bit-significance order issues and the ability to sanity-check it just by looking at it textually. As the author of a library that consumes leap-second tables, my ideal format would look something like this: a text file with first line for MJD of expiration date, and each subsequent line with the MJD of the start of the offset period, a tab, and then the UTC-TAI seconds difference. That said, my notion of UTC is restricted to the step- wise bit after 1972, and others might want more information. -- Ashley Yakeley
