Dear Colleagues, I have removed the trailing spaces that you noticed and the new files are now posted at both ftp locations. With all due respect and with no offense intended, I suggest that software that is sensitive to trailing whitespace should be re-considered. The comment lines are intended to be helpful for any poor soul who is not familiar with the various time formats and the definition of leap seconds. I consider that stuff to be helpful explanations and not data. The point of making them comments is that they could be easily ignored by the usual software that parses scripts and by users who understand all of the strange and wondrous details of UTC. I designed the two "special" comment lines so that they could be found by reading the first two characters on every line in the file without parsing every line. Also, they would not have to be at any special line number in the file. I did not invent this idea -- UNIX scripts use the same method to identify the shell. For example, a script that did not care about the checksum could ignore that value without any special processing. I invented the file format in the dark ages based on what I thought would be useful at the time. I will *consider* improvements or changes with the understanding that the file is used on many different and incompatible operating systems. Any "improvement" that breaks this requirement is unlikely to be useful. Best wishes, Judah Levine On 7/29/2019 7:01 AM, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
Chris Woodbury via tz said:
Back in the dark ages, when I first started writing C code, it was said that the ultimate documentations was the code. "If the code and the comments disagree, they're probably both wrong."
-- Judah Levine Time and Frequency Division NIST Boulder