Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:34:37 -0700
From: Paul Eggert via tz <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
| This reminds me of the error in C89,
It is much older than that.
| It's unlikely that this sort of thing is what C89's authors and
| Python's developers were thinking of.
No, it came from the very early days of time code, when not much was
known about leap seconds, and there wasn't a lot of documentation
around yet (pre www, and certainly pre wikipedia and similar).
At the time, what was known (by some of us who were working on time
related code, back then) was that there could be up to 2 leap seconds
each year - that they meant perhaps one Dec 31, and another June 30,
was not clear. So the code was written to allow for possibly having
2 at the same time, though there had never been a recorded instance
of that happening, or even there ever actually being 2 in the same year
as best I remember (which is not a reliable gauge).
After that it was all cargo cult ... that code allows for that, they
must have known what they were doing, so we'll do that too.
kre
