[LEAPSECS] pick your own length of second

[Ian Batten]

On 12 Jan 2012, at 0232, Dennis Ferguson wrote:


> 

> If we had a leap second every other week we'd have gotten so

> much real life practice that depending on the code and procedures

> to handle the leap wouldn't seem so scary.  


It would mean that everything that relies on interval timing would need to understand leap seconds, however, which currently they (in general) don't.   Other than in very specialised applications, timestamp arithmetic doesn't need to be conscious of leap seconds when they are once every 18 months so so; if they were more frequent (like half-serious proposals to go forward one month and back the next, leaving one out in order to perform a leap of the opposite sign) then much more code would need to be aware of it, and because unlike leap years they're not predictable it would be extremely complex to organise for non-connected devices.

ian