At 18:46 +0100 3/3/04, Jos Visser wrote: >Nahhh.... Epoch should be 1-1-1970 at 12:00am midnight, *but* we will >have to allow for negative time values so that we can span either side >of eternity...
That's not so strange. On of the, very few, things Microsoft has done right is to use floating point days for time. Whether it's days or seconds doesn't matter but the ability to handle very long time intervals in a manner that politely degrades in precision in both directions is useful. It is quite possible to be a paleontologist working with times measured as MYA, million years ago, without having to invent a new time system. It's also possible to use nanosecond precision for times near the epoch. And. It would be nice to include leap seconds which get added once in a while to keep atomic clocks synchronized with the variable rotation of the earth. They are not known until July 1 and Jan 1 of each year when they are announced by the folks at NIST. With GPS becoming a serious navigation system for the rest of us, such things might well become important within the decade of perl 6. There is also the "real" Julian date system that has been around since Newton was a child. The unit is one day and the date changes at noon to accommodate astronomers who want to take all of their nightly observations on the same day. Today is 2453067.5. <http://wwwmacho.mcmaster.ca/JAVA/JD.html> And a conversion to Martian time will be needed. -- --> On the eighth day, about 6 kiloyears ago, the Lord realized that free will would make man ask what existed before the Creation. So He installed a few gigayears of history complete with a big bang and a fossilized record of evolution. <--
