5 ms·
A point on the globe has a timezone. "Distance from London in feet" does not.
by BoiledCabbage 4y ago
A point on the globe has a timezone. "Distance from London in feet" does not.
- mannykannot 4y agoThat is true, but a timestamp is intended to specify a particular time, and a simple temporal interval fails to do that just as a simple spatial interval fails to specify a location; both are incomplete (the former on account of a missing starting point, and your counter-example on account of a missing azimuth.) On the other hand Unix (POSIX) time does not have leap-seconds, while UTC does not, so it is no longer "in" UTC.
- yakubin 4y agoPOSIX time isn’t “in UTC” regardless of that. UTC is just one of many timezones you can use when specifying which point in time timestamp 0 refers to. You could just as well use EST or anything else.
- mannykannot 4y agoYou are right - through this discussion, I have come to see that unless a value expresses a specific time (as opposed to interval) in a form that includes hours and minutes, then timezone is not an applicable concept. POSIX time does not do this.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y agoThis should be files under "falsehoods programmers believe about timezones".
- sanderjd 4y agoSo the analogy is "Distance from London in feet" to "Time since epoch in seconds"? Ok, but "epoch" has a timezone, which is UTC, so measurements relative to that have the same timezone.