Re: AGAINST RFC 48 (v1) Replace localtime() and gmtime() with da

[Russ Allbery]

Bart Lateur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> What's so hard? Subtracting 2 hours and 30 minutes from the official
> referential time (GMT)? Or the Daylight Savings Time rules?

It's not a problem of implementation.  It's a problem of semantics due to
the way Perl parses the language.

Suppose you call:

    date (time, undef, -0230);

What does that mean in terms of time-zone offsets?  Are you subtracting
230 seconds from UTC?  230 minutes?  A negative octal number?  :)  The
syntax people are used to for specifying time zone offsets *looks* like a
number but actually isn't one.

You can require that it be passed as a string, but writing something like
the above would be a *very* common new user mistake.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>