In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Bjorn Gabrielsson writes: >[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mike S) writes: > >> Programmers cause programming errors. Leap seconds may make them apparent. >>=20 >> >Certainly the death (if it occurred) was not an automatic result of the = >leapsecond, but rather was the result of something that broke because it wa= >sn't properly programmed to deal with the leapsecond. >>=20 >> The counter argument is that removing leapseconds will break properly imp= >lemented systems in unknown ways, the blame will them be not with someone w= >ho did things in violation of a well documented specification, but with tho= >se who changed the specification in a fundamentally incompatible way for se= >lfish reasons. > >How does a properly implemented system accounting for leapseconds fail >when leapseconds fail to come? Sure there will be unnessesary code >that could be removed. But I do not see why the system would break.
My interpretation of this is that systems which assume that DUT < 1s fail, when leap seconds are applied. That's probably true, but since DUT is only relevant if you study extraterrestial objects, we can safely assume that 99.9% or more of those systems involve astronomers and optics. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts