[LEAPSECS] one second tolerance

[Michael Deckers]

    On 2011-02-10 20:42, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote about
    the Danish summer time law:


> Yes, one interesting detail here is the use of the word "klokketiden"

> which literally means "(Church-)Bell-Time", but which most people

> would understand as "clock-time"

>

> This word first appears in 1946 in the first law to introduce

> DST in Denmark, and _presumably_, but we cannot know for sure,

> this was meant to distinguish "clock time" from "solar time":

> 	http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=klokketid


    Very interesting indeed! "klokketiden" also shows up in
    web sites of Greenland and Norway (bokmål). I do not know
    enough Danish -- could it have a function similar to the
    (US) English wall clock time?

    He continued about the use of suffixes 'A' and 'B'
    to distinguish between the "repeated" datetimes that
    occur when a civil time scale is set back from summer
    time to winter time:


>  I have only ever seen it once, and that was my own doing:

>

>  When we ran into this, We tried to see if we could fit

>  the 'A/B' designator on the receipt printed by the automatic

>  gas-pumps without using another line of text.

>

>  We couldn't and since we could not have a special print format

>  during that one hour a day, compliance would have used 138km more

>  paper per year.


    Which evidently wasn't worth it. I've heard objections against
    the notation on the grounds that letter suffixes like A and B
    are used in the military, where they denote fixed time zones
    (Alpha for UTC + 1 h, Bravo for UTC + 2 h, ...).

    Thanks.

    Michael Deckers.