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> There is not a 1:1 correspondence between Unix time and UTC Or between any two time formats, but Unix time still makes for the cleanest intermediary by far.
by chimeracoder 14y ago
> There is not a 1:1 correspondence between Unix time and UTC
Or between any two time formats, but Unix time still makes for the cleanest intermediary by far.
- rmc 14y agoNo, it is possible to convert between some time formats. For example, if I invented a new time format that actually was "number of seconds since midnight 1/1/1970" then you could actually convert 1:1 between it and UTC. It's just that you can't do it with some formats, like UTC - Unix time or UTC - (only include the last 2 digits of the year like in Y2K)
- chimeracoder 14y agoMy point is that there's no one format that's going to have seamless conversion with everything that various applications need, but the UNIX timestamp still makes for the best intermediary by far.
- rmc 14y agoThere's a difference between "This is not a great time format for conversions" and "This value in the format represents 2 possible different actual times and we have no idea how to tell them apart"
- wl 14y agoUTC is cleaner than Unix time. Slewing the clock to deal with leap seconds isn't exactly clean. TAI is even better, though. A steady stream of seconds after an epoch without leap seconds causing complications.