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Re: Time::Local

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From:
Mark Reed
Date:
August 15, 2005 13:41
Subject:
Re: Time::Local
Message ID:
BF26761F.B3FB%mark.reed@turner.com
On 2005-08-15 13:56, "Larry Wall" <larry@wall.org> wrote:
> Perl 6 will natively think of dates as number of floating point TAI
> seconds from the year 2000.  You can build any kind of date interface
> on top of that, but we're going for simplicity and predictability.

I applaud that decision.  I just have one question: will the zero point be
chosen according to TAI or UTC?

I would assume that you would choose time 0.0 =  Jan 1, 2000 at 00:00:00.0
TAI (December 31, 1999 at 23:59:29.0 UTC), making the whole thing free of
any UTC interferences.  But there is an argument for making the zero point a
recognizable boundary in civil time.  The Olson library does that (its zero
point is 00:00:10.0 TAI on Jan 1, 1970), but that's only because it's
designed to be a drop-in replacement for the standard POSIX library and the
time_t values have to match.  Since you're changing the epoch, there's no
compatibility constraint here . . .








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