Perhaps a stupid question: Why isn't there a time standard that is monotonic and defined simply in terms of seconds, without attempting to match the movement of the earth (no leap seconds, no negative seconds, no daylight savings, no complicated calendar politics)?
If such standard existed, wouldn't it be the best to use for programming, with "simple" conversions to/from the all the other standards?
Basically, I want a monotonic clock that starts at an arbitrary point (I would suggest Isaac Newton's birthday), is able to go all the way back to the big bang, and forward until the heat death of the universe, with millisecond or better precision.
Not a stupid question...it's the central question here.
Unix time is set up to allow programmers to assume every day has the same number of seconds. Is this the best approach, or would it have been better to try to educate everyone not to make that assumption and to use a standard library for all UTC calendaring?
If such standard existed, wouldn't it be the best to use for programming, with "simple" conversions to/from the all the other standards?
Basically, I want a monotonic clock that starts at an arbitrary point (I would suggest Isaac Newton's birthday), is able to go all the way back to the big bang, and forward until the heat death of the universe, with millisecond or better precision.