| Bottom line is: time is quite complicated, and things get messy when you try to overload different usages or engineering constraints. Including but not limited to: - small, limited, and/or fixed data size - compatibility across systems - range of expressable times - monotonicity (either locally or distributed) - express absolute datetimes accurately - express relative offsets accurately - accurate over very short or very long timescales (or both) - synchrony to solar noon - synchrony to sidereal time - timezones - relativisitc effects Pick any, uhhh, well pick as many as you can and try to shoehorn them together and you get your typical time implementation. |