[LEAPSECS] alternative to smearing

[Zefram]

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