[LEAPSECS] BBC radio Crowd Science

[John Sauter]

On Tue, 2017-01-31 at 14:44 -0700, Warner Losh wrote:

...

> In both cases, we did need to know that 23:59 had 61 seconds, but we
> didn't need to have a special leap second flag associated with any of
> the timestamps for the math to work out right. Knowing that it has 61
> seconds sometimes is exactly the same thing as knowing that sometimes
> February has 29 days some years. The only difference is that one is a
> math formula for thousands of years, and the other is a table lookup.

...

In my time manipulation subroutines I have functions to compute the
length of the current and previous month, and the current and previous
minute, in both local time and UTC.  To compute the length of February
I do the Gregorian calculation.  To compute the length of minute 23:59
I look up the value of TAI-UTC in a table.
    John Sauter (John_Sauter at systemeyescomputerstore.com)