[LEAPSECS] Lets get REAL about time.

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Sun Jan 22 12:22:52 EST 2012


In message <CAPYb0EF+-8rvG95Y0-mC9QD5mjWwZR_E3HiJHD_RbwhQeOux2w at mail.gmail.com>
, Bob Paddock writes:


>I take issues with hardware requiring those kind of resources to keep

>track of time.

>There are more Embedded Systems today running at well under 100 MHz (or 10 MHz),

>and 128 Floating Point on them just isn't going to happen.


Neither is, in my experience, any kind of timekeeping :-)

One if the obvious ways to provide a "limited" functionality in my
proposed API, is to allow any floating point type, with corresponding
loss of resolution. This is an aspect I particularly like, with FP
we won't loose range, only resolution.

But shelve this issue for now, I want to start with an API which Does
The Right Thing, and then move on from there, to see if this is
feasible.


>"TAI64, covering a few hundred billion years with 1-second precision;

>(2) TAI64NA, covering the same period with 1-attosecond precision"


See previous discussion about multi-radix formats.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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