It bothers me that a minute is not always 60 seconds. For leap seconds why did we choose 23:59:60 instead of 24:00:00? If we had went with the latter we also solve the daylight savings time problem. A day would last until 22:59:59 or 24:59:59 depending on the time of year. It seems like a lot of things would be simpler that way. Does anyone have a better understanding of why things ended up this way?
> It bothers me that a minute is not always 60 seconds. For leap seconds why did we choose 23:59:60 instead of 24:00:00? But how does this solve the problem? Sure, 23:59 is now 60 seconds long, but the minute 24:00 is only 1 second long.
It's about consistency. 23:59:60 is introducing a special case to the seconds field which you have to account for. 24:00:00 only adds a second to the day where it naturally should go. I don't redefine what a minute is, a minute is always 60 seconds. You are confusing two separate ideas, displaying a time and finding the difference between two times. Lexically you wouldn't say that minute is 1 second long, you would say that the day ends on the first second of the last new minute.