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Ask Slashdot: How Many Time Standards Are There?

Posted by timothy on from the didn't-suffer-slept-right-through-it dept.

jjoelc writes "Being one of those 'suffering' through the time change last night, the optimist in me reminded me that it could be much worse. That's when I started wondering how many different time/date standards there really are. Wikipedia is a good starting point, but is sorely lacking in the various formats used by e.g. Unix, Windows, TRS-80, etc. And that is without even getting into the various calendars that have been in and out of use throughout the ages. So how about it? How many different time/date 'standards' can we come up with? I'm betting there are more than a few horror stories of having to translate between them..."

1 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. There are worse things related to time by Dracos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Worse than suffering through the actual daylight/standard time changeovers, are dealing with timezones themselves in code. Most timezones are full hour offsets from UTC, but there are a few that are N:30 or N:45. There are even offsets which are greater than 12.

    Then you have to deal with differing dates of when the changeovers actually happen over the years in a given timezone.

    If you ever write an iCal-related application and have to deal with recurring events, you'll soon realize that Outlook's iCal support is comparatively even worse than IE's web standards support.

    Also, relevant xkcd.