[LEAPSECS] alternative to smearing

Zefram zefram at fysh.org
Wed Jan 4 12:20:42 EST 2017


John Sauter wrote:
>I don't regard leap seconds as being a special kind of awful.  The
>Gregorian calendar has February, which if it had been introduced in
>1972 would have been regarded as "awful" for computers because it has a
>variable length.

There's a big difference between these two: February varies in a fixed,
regular manner, whereas UTC days are unpredictable.  The Gregorian
calendar is of the arithmetic variety, whereas UTC is an observational
calendar.  UTC is qualitatively more difficult to handle.

-zefram


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