OP here. You're right - what I'm proposing is not directly human readable, but I don't think that means the use of SLOPE is delegated for extraordinary or scien

OP here. You're right - what I'm proposing is not directly human readable, but I don't think that means the use of SLOPE is delegated for extraordinary or scientific use cases alone. I am certainly thinking about it as a way between different technologies to talk to one another. The ISO representation of time, YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ, is certainly far more human readable than a series of unix timestamps S;L;O;P;E. However, this is where the advantage stops - especially for the developer who has to parse and manipulate the ISO string. Take incrementing the timestamp by one day, for example. Intuition would direct you to split the ISO string into it's components, increment the DD data, and reconstruct it. However, it's far more complicated than that: months have different numbers of days, and it would require modifying both MM and DD if so (leap years taken into account too). You may need to increment the year as well if DD==12. Something this simple shouldn't be so difficult. Most languages have standard libraries that contain methods to handle these complexities, but it's a nightmare to deal with different protocols for each to do so. With SLOPE, the point in time can be incremented easily without confusion: add 606024 (86400) to the "start." I'm probably going to make a follow-up post to address this one issue (it's a big one). With some code, I think it becomes more clear. As for the seasons and Gregorian point...well...