On 12/17/23, Andy Smith <a...@strugglers.net> wrote: >> how on earth would that not always produce an accurate duration? > > All this paranoia, but in computer time you trust? 😀 > Falsehoods programmers believe about time > https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca
and how does my paranoia relate to that wall of itemized statements which could be reduced to just a few? No the earth doesn't revolve around the sun in exactly 356 days, ... and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar already caused quite a fuss in the history of humankind, which, believe me, didn't have to do at all with my paranoia. All my paranoia is talking about is that: 1) for historical reasons going back to the Sumerian/Babylonian civilization, the date format we use is not 10-based 2) coreutils date is not quite true to itself when it comes to en- and decoding its own formatting options 3) since time is a scalar magnitude, a time difference will be constant regardless of my paranoia and the statements on that link you posted. 4) contrary to what happens with floating point numbers (which, in general, you can't represent truthfully as binary), a time difference in seconds is whole number which you can exactly represent as binary. Even people who are not paranoid and know their sh!t would easily see my points. I would say it is primary school Arithmetic. lbrtchx
