Re: RFC 99 (v1) Maintain internal time in Modified Julian (not epoch)

[Tim Jenness]

On 14 Aug 2000, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Day resolution is insufficient for most purposes in all the Perl scripts
> I've worked on.  I practically never need sub-second precision; I almost
> always need precision better than one day.
> 

MJD allows fractional days (otherwise it would of course be useless).

As I write this the MJD is 51771.20833

> If we're aiming at replacing time, it has to provide *at least* second
> precision, at which point I really don't see the advantage of MJD over
> Unix time.  Why change something that works?

It should be able to provide this precision and more.

At some level time() will have to be changed to support fractions of a
second and this may break current code that uses time() explicitly
rather than passing it straight to localtime() and gmtime().

As long as I can do simplistic date arithmetic with the return value
of time() and retrieve that from the equivalent date() object I will be
happy.

-- 
Tim Jenness
JCMT software engineer/Support scientist
http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/~timj