4 ms·

Why deal with the complexity of leap seconds; given TAI why should society as a whole deal with the complexity of leap seconds just because it makes life a litt

• acqq 12y ago
  It's not about being easy for the astronomers but for the humans. The astronomers already have to use all of TAI, UT0, UT1 and UTC and much more complex calculations. We other humans use days. We have the daylight saving time and nobody cares for an hour difference twice a year because those who do care use the less moving time stamps, often called UTC, even if they are just "synchronized with UTC" and not exactly UTC, as they have in POSIX-inspired systems exactly 86400 seconds in a day, always. Only some of the programmers then "discover" the definition of the leap second and remain confused by the fact that their computers use "UTC" name and wrongly think that the exact leap seconds are important for them even if they only need the calendar time. If you use the POSIX time routines (and you almost certainly do use them unless you tweaked something wrongly) you already don't have to deal with the complexities of the leap seconds (but you should care about DST!) Every day in what POSIX calls "Seconds Since the Epoch" (but is sometimes referred to as UTC) has in fact the same number of seconds (if you know C it's what you get in time_t for all the time stamps). Only the OS-es have to be fixed to smooth the leap seconds instead of introducing them at once, and then even some obscure sync bugs will never happen any more. Google proved that it's a good approach.