Using seconds in Revolution

[Dar Scott]

On Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 12:20 PM, Dar Scott wrote:

> Seconds are seconds.

My attempt at brevity (I yak too much and I'm feeling crumby today, 
anyway) might make my comments terse, cryptic and even abrasive.  I'll 
try again.

The seconds are uniform and continuous and well defined.  (Except... 
see below.)

If I had anything serious to do with dates and times, I'd first look at 
Sarah Reicheit's library stack.  I have not seen it, but it sounds 
promising.  I would either build on that, make my own functions or, 
should speed be a problem, find ways to make sure the built-in commands 
do what I want.  I would consider those in that order.

If you use seconds for sub-second work, then you shouldn't use convert 
or time during that on some systems; they interact.  However, if you 
use your own date-time functions based on seconds, it is OK.  I assume 
so on all systems.

If the clock on the computer is corrected, the seconds is adjusted.  
Though this is a problem for those using sockets or send or timing 
things, this is normally what is needed when thinking of date and time. 
  Changing to/from daylight savings is not a correction in the sense I'm 
using here; it is a view.

Perhaps, this way, by using your own functions and seconds you avoid 
the sub-second timing problems, the use of system time-zone in 
conversions, the alleged problems with daylight savings, and the zone 
problems in Internet time conversions.

Dar Scott