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Liam Quin scripsit:
> Even the length of a day is not in fact entirely constant,
> because of leap seconds, and because of daylight savings time.
> (I would like to make a withdrawal from my savings, please!)
Leap seconds do affect the length of the day, but daylight saving
changes don't. It's true that certain *calendar* days have 23 or
25 hours in them, but "a day" means either 24 hours or on rare
occasions 24 hours and 1 second.
> One approach to arithmetic is to convert durations to a
> number of seconds, and dates to a nuber of seconds past some
> epoch, an offset from UTC, and a local timezone name.
I think a sensible approach to the duration value space is to
ignore leap seconds (as is conventional) and to construe
a duration as an ordered pair <months, seconds>.
--
Knowledge studies others / Wisdom is self-known; John Cowan
Muscle masters brothers / Self-mastery is bone; jcowan@reutershealth.com
Content need never borrow / Ambition wanders blind; www.ccil.org/~cowan
Vitality cleaves to the marrow / Leaving death behind. --Tao 33 (Bynner)
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