June 13, 2004
10 p.m.
"Mark Davis" <mark.davis@jtcsv.com> writes:
You are saying that if I generated a series of dates, one per year, going back 100 years, that the format would change in the middle?
Absolutely, if by "dates" you mean time stamps including the name of the local time in question. This is the only feasible way to address the problem. Locations can have several different UTC offsets over the years (not just two). For example, "Sri Lanka Time" means UTC+6 for current time stamps, but it means UTC+6:30 for time stamps in summer 1996 because Sri Lanka changed its definition of standard time in October 1996. Numeric UTC offsets avoid this problem, but of course they have some other problems of their own. There's no free lunch here.