On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 4:02 AM, Alexander Belopolsky <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 1:40 PM, Chris Angelico <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> That's why it's safest to be clear about UTC >> usage, and honestly, this has nothing to do with what a computer can >> and can't be taught to do - it's all about what humans can get their >> heads around. > > UTC is no better than DMT (Dragonlance Mean Time). In fact, I think I will > have easier time explaining DMT to a ten year old than explaining UTC. If > your team can agree on a natural language, they can agree on a timescale. > It does not matter what it is. If uniformity was a universal virtue, we > would all be speaking Esperanto by now.
If I were creating my own standard out of thin air, then yes, it wouldn't make a lot of difference, and I could pick anywhere. (There are a few invariants that I'd maintain, such as that it should "tick" the same way our civil clocks do - one second equals one civil second, and they're packaged up into hours and days the same way - but it doesn't matter what the exact offset is.) But UTC already exists, and that gives it an inherent advantage. I've never tried to explain DMT to anyone, but explaining a simplified form of GMT/UTC (ignore leap seconds, ignore relativity, ignore UT0/UT1 etc) is pretty easy - it's just a well-known time zone that has no DST. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Datetime-SIG mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/datetime-sig The PSF Code of Conduct applies to this mailing list: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
