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Leap seconds have no business being tracked in the core logic of our programs.

Just like timezones and calendar changes, leap seconds are a display issue. While obviously very important in some circumstances there's no need to keep track of them through absolutely all of our code.

If the way you measure time takes leap seconds into account, you have no way of saying "exactly X Système international seconds from now". This is a big deal.

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> If the way you measure time takes leap seconds into account, you have no way of saying "exactly X Système international seconds from now".

Note that this is the case for anyone using POSIX time, which inherently assumes that hours start on multiples of 3600, and has to be adjusted or smeared when a leap second happens.

But I've never seen a system that follows your recommendation, using TAI as the internal time and something like TAI-5:00:36 as the local time, except for GPS devices.

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