3 ms·

I made no claim of it being less complicated, and I am not aware of the general public's primary issue with the time changing being one of complexity. If the c

I made no claim of it being less complicated, and I am not aware of the general public's primary issue with the time changing being one of complexity. If the clocks are automated, nobody really notices the gradual change. My perception is the public's major complaint is the jarring disturbance to their lives an overnight +-1-hour change has.

recursive 8y ago
As a person who works on software that cares about what time it is, and already struggles with the existing DST rules, I think I would change careers if this were adopted. Measuring the elapsed time between two instants would become extremely difficult.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  We're already in a world where you really need to rely on external date+time libraries to apply a locale-specific temporally-varying offset from UTC. I don't see it as being a significant implementation difference if that offset changes a smaller amount at midnight on a short sequence of days vs. a larger amount at midnight on just one of those days. Either way you need to be leap-aware.
  - recursive 8y ago
    The amount of information embedded in leap-awareness would be significantly different. Right now DST is modelled as two different time zones that are switched between. If you want to handle it the same way, I guess you'd need 365 (366?) "time zones" per time zone. I can't see how you can argue that's not a significant implementation difference.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      Let's say we wanted to turn it into a gradient where we instead shifted five minutes per night, so we need 12 days to transition an hour. You could just add a transition countdown field "-" to the "S" and "D" timezones being transitioned to, dropping it once the transition is finished. e.g. for Pacific time: PST -> PD-12T -> PD-11T -> PD-10T ... PD-1T -> PDT and in reverse: PDT -> PS-12T -> PS-11T -> PS-10T ... PS-1T -> PST If you already have the indirection of the table, it doesn't increase implementation complexity to put some more rows in it. I don't see where you got 365 zones per time zone, unless you thought I was proposing we change the time a little bit every single day of the year. That's entirely unnecessary to eliminate the practical nuisance of the sudden 1-hour jump.

recursive 8y ago

As a person who works on software that cares about what time it is, and already struggles with the existing DST rules, I think I would change careers if this were adopted. Measuring the elapsed time between two instants would become extremely difficult.

newnewpdro 8y ago
We're already in a world where you really need to rely on external date+time libraries to apply a locale-specific temporally-varying offset from UTC. I don't see it as being a significant implementation difference if that offset changes a smaller amount at midnight on a short sequence of days vs. a larger amount at midnight on just one of those days. Either way you need to be leap-aware.
- recursive 8y ago
  The amount of information embedded in leap-awareness would be significantly different. Right now DST is modelled as two different time zones that are switched between. If you want to handle it the same way, I guess you'd need 365 (366?) "time zones" per time zone. I can't see how you can argue that's not a significant implementation difference.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    Let's say we wanted to turn it into a gradient where we instead shifted five minutes per night, so we need 12 days to transition an hour. You could just add a transition countdown field "-" to the "S" and "D" timezones being transitioned to, dropping it once the transition is finished. e.g. for Pacific time: PST -> PD-12T -> PD-11T -> PD-10T ... PD-1T -> PDT and in reverse: PDT -> PS-12T -> PS-11T -> PS-10T ... PS-1T -> PST If you already have the indirection of the table, it doesn't increase implementation complexity to put some more rows in it. I don't see where you got 365 zones per time zone, unless you thought I was proposing we change the time a little bit every single day of the year. That's entirely unnecessary to eliminate the practical nuisance of the sudden 1-hour jump.