mktime() like function to produce GMT?

[Guido van Rossum]

Charles G Waldman <cgw at fnal.gov> writes:

> Guido van Rossum writes:
> 
>  > Few clocks in the world are
>  > accurate enough to care about leap seconds.  
> 
> A cluster of (rather ordinary) machines running NTP easily reaches
> this level of precision.

Only if they synchronize with some atomic master clock.

>  > The rest of us occasionally synchronize with a master clock.  I
>  > don't care about leap seconds and never will.
> 
> It's quite important in astronomical applications.  I know, for
> instance, that the people here working on the Digital Sky Survey worry
> about leap seconds.

Yeah, yeah.  Of course the astronomers care.  They *invented* leap
seconds.  But they don't use the raw Unix clock in their calculations!

The Unix clock is defined, by POSIX and by pre-POSIX tradition,
without regard for leap seconds.  "Seconds since the epoch" is not the 
actual definition, only a suggestion of the used encoding.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)