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Re: six-page binary format draft
> > > time
> > > Time values are needed e.g. for expiration dates and timestamps.
> > > In this proposal, all times are represented as seconds from
> > > January 1, 1970, 00:00 UTC. The value is represented as uint32.
>
> Is that real seconds (as might be counted by somebody watching a carefully
> calibrated pendulum), or seconds counted in a weird way that pretends that
> pendulums suddenly jump or stop swinging during leap seconds?
In my view, it ought to be UTC despite the unpleasantness to which you
allude. There are times when pragmatism has to win over elegance, and
this is one of them.
> > The ISO date format "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss" is valid for another 9000 years.
>
> Yes, please use that format. And if you permit 5, 6, 7... digit years,
> then it has no built in obsolescence at all.
While we are considering the question, is the second a fine enough
quantum? It's not at all obvious to me that it is. If you permit (but
not require) the seconds field to have a decimal fraction portion we get
around that limitation as well. The binary format might represent the
fraction as, say, integer number of nanoseconds.
Paul
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