Lex --

I like your suggestion ...

Cheers,

Alan

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At 9:59 AM -0800 11/24/99, Lex Spoon wrote:
>Tim Rowledge <rowledge at interval.com> wrote:
>> On Tue 23 Nov, Lex Spoon wrote:
>>
>> > I keep hoping someone will jump up who understands time zones and
>> > calendrial calculations and such and implement something in Squeak that
>> > can be easily ported around.
>> Oh my, that's a _lot_ to hope for! At PPS some years ago we had a
>> multi-day mailstorm about timezone stuff that generated enough hot air
>> to send Branson across the Atlantic. Conclusion: it's _damn_
>> complicated. Basically you need a way to read the time and your
>> machine's timezone, plus a way to convert from one TZ to another.
>>
>> The good news is that by now all the OS's we use have at least some
>> understanding of timezones, where back then many didn't. I don't suppose
>> there is a website that offers zone/time conversion ? It may well be
>> simplest to pass the job off to a server somewhere.
>> Some timezones have a partial hour offset.
>> Some have wierd rules for daylight savings time start/stop.
>> Some appear to have no 'rules' - IIRC, UK DST is set on a year by year
>> basis.
>> Some have many names.
>> Ugh.
>>
>
>Hmm, okay, it would be kind of a shame to have 10k lines of code
>floating around the smalltalk image just to deal with this one issue.
>Though it's always nice to have things that are quietly Done Right, it's
>also nice to have code proportional to the benefit you get from it.
>
>Maybe to get started, we should simply add a "localtime" primitive to
>Squeak, which returns a tuple of both the global (GMT) time, and an
>offset from it to get to local time?  This would avoid a lot of
>conversion messes, and constrained platforms could simply implement the
>local-time offset as a constant somewhere.  There is already a basic
>dateAndTimeFromSeconds: implementation in class Time, so maybe this
>primitive would take us a long way.
>
>What do ya'll think?
>
>Lex