Re: difference in seconds between two formatted dates ...
On 12/17/23, Andy Smith <andy@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
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