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Re: Picking up the ball

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From:
Abigail
Date:
January 10, 2003 06:57
Subject:
Re: Picking up the ball
Message ID:
20030110160000.E412@hermione.osp.nl
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 09:07:05AM -0500, John Peacock wrote:
> Rich Bowen wrote:
> > I like ICal. But let's make sure that Tai is not the better way to go before
> > we hack something onto an IETF (or whoever it is) standard. 
> 
> As much as I like DJ Bernstein's coding style (the author of libtai), it is 
> unlikely that TAI64 will be appropriate for our use, since it is also based on 
> the Olson libraries epoch of 1970-01-01 00:00:10 TAI.
> 
> 	http://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html
> 
> I would prefer a structured variable; separate values for each period of 
> importace.  Since some people have explicitly mentioned wanting to handle deep 
> prehistory, the thought of subtracting attosecond precision over a range of 
> billions of years just scares me!  Of course, Math::BigInt could handle it...


Well, a 64 bit integer could deal with a range of over a billion years
with a 2 millisecond precision.... And with 2 64 int integers, one
could deal with 584 billion years, an attosecond precision, and 4 bits
to spare. ;-)



Abigail

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