On Jan 5, 2007, at 20:14, Rob Seaman wrote:
> An ISO string is really overkill, MJD can fit into
> an unsigned short for the next few decades
This isn't really a good idea. Most data formats have been moving
away from the compact towards more verbose, from binary to text to
XML. There are good reliability and extensibility reasons for this,
such as avoiding bit-significance order issues and the ability to
sanity-check it just by looking at it textually.
As the author of a library that consumes leap-second tables, my ideal
format would look something like this: a text file with first line
for MJD of expiration date, and each subsequent line with the MJD of
the start of the offset period, a tab, and then the UTC-TAI seconds
difference. That said, my notion of UTC is restricted to the step-
wise bit after 1972, and others might want more information.
--
Ashley Yakeley
Received on Fri Jan 05 2007 - 22:49:12 PST