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Liam Quin scripsit: > Even the length of a day is not in fact entirely constant, > because of leap seconds, and because of daylight savings time. > (I would like to make a withdrawal from my savings, please!) Leap seconds do affect the length of the day, but daylight saving changes don't. It's true that certain *calendar* days have 23 or 25 hours in them, but "a day" means either 24 hours or on rare occasions 24 hours and 1 second. > One approach to arithmetic is to convert durations to a > number of seconds, and dates to a nuber of seconds past some > epoch, an offset from UTC, and a local timezone name. I think a sensible approach to the duration value space is to ignore leap seconds (as is conventional) and to construe a duration as an ordered pair <months, seconds>. -- Knowledge studies others / Wisdom is self-known; John Cowan Muscle masters brothers / Self-mastery is bone; jcowan@r... Content need never borrow / Ambition wanders blind; www.ccil.org/~cowan Vitality cleaves to the marrow / Leaving death behind. --Tao 33 (Bynner)
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