[LEAPSECS] operational time -- What's in a name?

[Steve Allen]

On Fri 2008-03-28T16:04:49 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ:

> My personal preference would be to bite the bullet and live with

> the 128bit memory hit:

>

>       utc_t           64i.64f         (big enough, small enough)


Whereas I am not against the notion of such, I find that nomenclature
to be problematic, for UTC did not exist prior to 1960.

We must not forget the examples of Sweden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_30
and that, contrary to what everyone thought at the time, Julius was
assasinated on March 14, not 15
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar#Converting_pre-Julian_dates

It is never possible to get people to fix their notion of what time
they thought it was.
Any epoch-based proleptic time scale using uniform counting is a
conventional artifice which is unlikely to correspond to any other
retrospective scheme in current use or any scheme which was
contemporary at the given epoch.
Even if it is a broadly published international standard, nothing
constrains posterity from misusing the definition, or even changing
its notion of the meaning of a time scale and creating more such
examples.

It seems unlikely to me that any organization has the standing to
assert an unambiguous time scale that is both operational and
comprehensive across history.  If anyone gets close, I am sure that
there are obsessive/compulsive programmers who will write conversion
libraries in all the currently popular computer languages, and I am
also sure that those libraries will be ignored by a lot of systems
which do not care to be comprehensive.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
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