[JBDP]  George T. Joseph  wrote: 
> Also, for timeDuration purposes, I'm interpreting ISO8601 to mean that 1
> year = 12 months and 1 month =
> 30 days (via para 3.12 and 3.18). 
[JBDP]  So, one year is 360 days?  Hmmmmm!

> That might not always be accurate but it is
> always precise.
[JBDP]  Yes, always precisely wrong.  It's not an easy issue with a
straightforward solution, but it seems to me that the ISO 8601 approach is
simplistic and useless.  Does the interval from 1 Jan 2000 to 1 Jul 2001
really consist of 1 year, 6 months and 2 days? ...or is that 7 days!

The answer is that for the 'date' part of a duration you can normalize on
the basis that 12 months = 1 year and that's it.  You can't in general tell
how many days are equivalent to one month.  It depends on the context, e.g.
the base from which the duration is measured.  That's inconvenient but it
reflects the way the world works.  I pay my rent at monthly intervals.  How
many days elapse between my writing one cheque and writing the next varies
from one month to the next.  That's the way it is and artificial
simplifications like saying 1 month = 30 days just don't correspond to
reality.

-- jP --


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