[LEAPSECS] alternative to smearing

[John Sauter]

I have updated my time papers to reflect Bulletin C number 53 from the
IERS, which confirmed that there will not be a leap second for at least
six months.  "Extending Coordinated Universal Time to Dates Before
1972" is at this URL:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Extending_Coordinated_Universal_Time_to_Dates_Before_1972.pdf

Building upon the results presented in that paper is "Avoid Using POSIX
time_t for Telling Time", at this URL:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Avoid_Using_POSIX_time_t_for_Telling_Time.pdf

The latter paper includes some subroutines to make it easy for
application programmers to use the tm structure rather than time_t. 
Steve Summit has kindly agreed to host that software on his web site
for those who are unable to extract it from the PDF file, at this URL:

http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/time/sauter/

I would appreciate any feedback that anyone would care to provide on
these papers.  I am particularly interested in knowing about errors in
the software.  It is my hope that this software will be used by
application programmers to avoid the bugs caused by time running
backwards that we saw in the most recent leap second.

While it is impossible to know for certain when the next leap second
will occur, I predict it will be December 31, 2022.
    John Sauter (John_Sauter at systemeyescomputerstore.com)

-- 
PGP fingerprint E24A D25B E5FE 4914 A603  49EC 7030 3EA1 9A0B 511E
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