[LEAPSECS] What's the point?

[Warner Losh]

On 02/10/2011 17:22, Mark Calabretta wrote:

> On Fri 2011/02/11 02:14:11 +0200, Paul Sheer wrote

> in a message to: Leap Second Discussion List<leapsecs at leapsecond.com>

>

>> Why is because there is a semi-infinite number of existing

>> lines of code, right now in use, that calculate the day from

>> the second and visa-versa using,

>>

>>    d = t / 86400

>>    t = d * 86400

> And this code is going to be running 10000+ years from now?


I imagine some variation will be :)  It will likely be translated, maybe 
mechanically, into a few dozen different languages along the way, and it 
is hard to say which bits of code that are extant today will survive 
that period of time (since after all 10,000 years ago nobody was 
speaking anything like what we speak today anywhwere on the planet 
(although linguists will tell us that proto versions of the major 
languages likely existed in that time frame)).

I've used data visualization and manipulation systems that started out 
life on a PDP-11, were ported to the VAX running Fortran-77, then ported 
to linux with a fortran to C conversion program and then heavily 
augmented and hacked from there.  The code-base was started in the 70's 
and has survived over 40 years and is still going strong...  I'm sure 
there are a number of assumptions in the code that were true in 1975 or 
1985 that are no longer true today, but that nobody has noticed being 
incorrect...

Without a plan, people will keep doing what they are doing now.  Today's 
code might not be around in 10k years, but if people don't come up with 
a plan, then code written 1k or 5k years from now will still have the 
same problems.

Warner