Re: [Cbor] Encoding Arbitrary Time Ratios

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2021-04-03, at 03:39, Emile Cormier <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> To allow the encoding any arbitrary time ratios, I propose a new CBOR tag wrapping an array of 1 to 3 values:
> 
> [Count, Numerator, Denominator]

Right.  We already have tag 30 for rational numbers of form n/d.
So this would be c*n/d.
I’d imagine that in many applications, n/d would be a “constant” (i.e., available from the application’s context); prefix packing or simply a convention could handle this.

> where Count is an integral or floating point number, and Numerator and Denominator are integers representing the ratio in seconds.The Numerator and Denominator would default to 1 if absent.

Only the trailing elements really can be “absent” (they could be null as well, but why not simply encode the 1 then).  Not sure that the denominator is likely to be the one that one would leave out.

> CBOR tags 1001-1003 would be extended to allow this new CBOR tag as the value key. This would allow me to encode additional metadata on the std::chrono::time_point clock type (POSIX, UTC, TAI, GPS).

Right, similar to the way we already handle 4 and 5 (and probably should add 30).
Alternatively, there could be separate keys for numerator and denominator, so these could be freely left out and/or combined.

I’m not so familiar with the use cases of this except for a scale factor of 86400 (i.e., days).

Grüße, Carsten