Ask Slashdot: How Many Time Standards Are There?

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..."

Really two very broad subjects

[Anonymous Coward]

1. How many different date/time standards has the human race come up with

2. How many different data structures and APIs have tech companies invented in trying to model the present-day Gregorian calendar (with time zones and DST, etc) used by most Western countries?

It's anyone's guess which one would produce a higher number.

Re:Time Standards vs. Time Formats, and Y10K probl

[eneville]

Isn't that somewhat close to ISO 8601? I generally find it good and sensihle, helps with sorting and reading.

I'm not one for reddit, I must say

[AbRASiON]

However this particular topic has me wishing I could moderate the actual news posts themselves.
We get it, Americans don't like DST - good for you, please stop posting hundreds of goddamned articles on it.

Some of us like getting home from work with more free daylight to spend with the kids, excercise, do gardening or whatever. No, we can't change the time we start work, no we're NOT going to see business's move to an 8-4 model.

My only complaint is it's not an all round time thing, if society isn't going to move to the 8-4 model then damnit just change the zones forward.

Furthermore I've been told by several American pals in the last 2 or 3 days, they actually like DST, they dislike when it's not DST infact and it's just common misuse of the term, don't know if this is true or not.
In conclusion, just deal with it and for fucks sake stop posting these articles every year.

There are worse things related to time

[Dracos]

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 [xkcd.com].

Re:Total

[phantomfive]

And yet the ISO standard is year-month-day. It is used in China, and probably elsewhere.