Mike S wrote:
The real problem is systems (POSIX, particularly), which incorrectly
handle time, despite having over 40 years to get it right. They try to
please everyone, while pleasing no one. POSIX tracks and does
calculations on determinate intervals (seconds since 1/1/1970, and every
minute has 60 seconds), and also tries to handle civil time, which has
indeterminate intervals (unpredictable 61 second minutes). So it fails
by trying to do two mutually exclusive things.
Right, POSIX is neither UTC nor TAI: It is mostly a calendar device!
POSIX is really measuring day numbers, but using a counter which is
scaled by 86400. This means that on any day with a leap second, it is
not really using SI seconds as the time base.
It's not a particularly difficult problem to solve (timezone info is
regularly updated because of civil changes, historical leap seconds
could be, too), but requires thought about whether specific future
events should be considered as intervals or absolute time values.
Since there is no way to know about leap seconds several years into the
future, forward POSIX timestamps must always be considered as absolute
references. They should never be used for time intervals, even if that
is the (by far) most common use today. :-(
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
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