John Cowan wrote on 2003-01-29 17:56 UTC:
> The problem is that they are not announced much in advance, and one needs
> to keep a list of them back to 1972 which grows quadratically in size.
Is this a real problem?
Who really needs to maintain a full list of leap seconds and for what
application exactly?
Who needs to know about a leap second more than half a year in advance
but has no access to a time signal broadcasting service (the better ones
of which all carry leap second announcement information today)?
For pretty much any leapsecond-aware time-critical application that I
can think of, it seems more than sufficient to know:
- the nearest leap second to now
- TAI-UTC now
- UT1-UTC now
This information is trivial to broadcast in a fixed-width data format.
(For the nitpicker: The number of bits to represent TAI-UTC admittendly
grows logarithmically as be move away from 1950. We know we can live
with that, as O(log(t)) is equivalent to O(1) for engineering purposes.)
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
Received on Wed Jan 29 2003 - 11:05:04 PST