On 2011-12-23 23:35, Jay Daley wrote: ...
The beauty of the existing management of leap seconds is that it is transparent for most applications. Writing code to handle them where it is not needed is asking for trouble.
I agree. Not inserting leap seconds is logically equivalent to the ancient Babylonian system of defining the year as 360 days, because it had nicer factors than 365. The annual error is smaller but otherwise it's the same logic. Ditto for the Julian versus Gregorian calendar. We shouldn't make reality less convenient by making the calculations more convenient. On the Unix clock runout in 2038 - it is a completely disjoint issue, but just for fun, are people aware that this bug already hit in 2004 when the most significant bit flipped? Any software that was erroneously handling the Unix date as a signed integer broke. There were real, multi-million $ embarassments that never hit the press. Brian