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Huh, that's an interesting point. Not sure I agree though. I always was irritated by the complaint that leap seconds are complicated and must be eliminated, and I am convinced that eliminating them in UTC is the most idiotic decision ever made, and I sincerely hate the idiots who made it, but, indeed, the idea that UTC time is just a time-zone representation of linear TAI time on Earth does make a lot of sense. On the other hand, we still can convert between UTC and TAI, so treating TAI as primary only makes sense if it clearly would make things simpler. And it's very unclear if it would. It really seems like the "correct" abstraction, but the problem is that currently my main hack for avoiding time complexity is always using datetimes in UTC+0 internally, thus ignoring time zones until I need to display something for user. This way I know that 14:00 today + one month is still 14:00 in my "internal" time format, even if in the user TZ one is DST and the other one is not. And a hundred of other ugly things I am willing to ignore in practice. And in 99.999% of cases I don't even care how many days are in that month, let alone seconds. Now, if I cannot really add a month anymore (and I cannot in TAI, because months don't even really exist in TAI, since TAI isn't a solar year) in my internal time format, all that convenience goes away. I now must always worry about leap seconds and timezones and all the stuff I don't really need to think about in the vast majority of cases. …Yeah, well, I'm really not sure. I am not convinced, and am honestly kinda relieved by the fact I won't have to find out. But it's an interesting point nevertheless. And, no, UTC w/o leap seconds is not the same thing. In fact, UTC w/o leap seconds is kinda the polar opposite: it's clearly the wrong abstraction, because it ignores the (not even so hard) problem somebody doesn't want to deal with, which doesn't really go away, but is very practical. |
Unless there's a leap second in that month. Then it would be 13:59. Maybe you don't care, but some people do. It could have legal or technical ramifications.
> Now, if I cannot really add a month anymore (and I cannot in TAI, because months don't even really exist in TAI, since TAI isn't a solar year).
What do you mean by month? Calendar months are obviously irregular (thanks February). "30 days" makes perfect sense in TAI. Indeed, 14:00 today + 30 days would always be 14:00 in TAI.