Guido van Rossum wrote:
Since we're on the subject, its always distressed me (in a purely intellectual way) that Unix time doesn't _really_ convert to wall-clock time properly, because it ignores leap seconds. The effect of this is that times in the past get converted incorrectly by several seconds (how many depending on exactly when in the past, of course).
I don't suppose there's interest in fixing that?
Given how timestamps in a typical Unix system are used, I think ignoring leap seconds is the only sensible thing. The POSIX standard agrees. If by "fixing" you mean taking leap seconds into account in any way, I would strongly object that.
Actually, now I think about it again, its not the human readable version that's wrong (though there is this silly issue that there are some seconds that you can't represent as Unix timestamps), its the interval between two timestamps that's wrong. Anyway, its not an issue I'm hugely passionate about - though I imagine it might matter to some scientists - I just thought I'd mention it, since we're on the subject. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff