On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Chris Dolan wrote:
On Feb 19, 2009, at 10:17 PM, Timothy S. Nelson wrote:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Larry Wall wrote:
Well, leaving that rant aside, I'm still tempted to say that times
in Perl 6 are TAI seconds since 2000. Standard TAI would work too.
I've wondered sometimes about the idea of having a dual/moving epoch.
By this, I mean that you have eg. two Ints, one which represents the years
since 1AD or whatever, and the other of which represents the number of
seconds from the beginning of that year. I'm sure many of you can see the
advantages and disadvantages of that scheme better than I can, but I
thought I'd throw it out there so you can all see whether or not you like
it.
I don't see the advantage of either of those. TAI 2000 is just UTC 1970 plus
a constant offset. 1AD is just UTC 1970 minus a bigger constant offset.
Sure, those are slightly easier epochs for a human (ignoring the
Julian/Gregorian shift), but not any easier for a computer. UTC 1970 has the
big advantage that it is already the underlying value returned by most
operating systems and many date/time libraries, so there's no extra additive
operation to perform if that's what you want.
Having now read the Wikipedia page on time_t, I withdraw my suggestion
:).
A much more important issue is the use of integer seconds. Milliseconds is a
The new interface looks like it will cope with something small fairly
well. Dave Rolsky is doing a good job, even though I think there may be room
for improvement :).
Maybe Perl 6 should be really forward looking and include a time dilation
factor so it can be the first language designed from the ground up for
interstellar travelers who want to use a non-inertial reference. Or GPS?
I'm not a rocket surgeon, but we'd need a $.velocity to calculate
that, wouldn't we?
:)
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| Name: Tim Nelson | Because the Creator is, |
| E-mail: wayl...@wayland.id.au | I am |
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