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by WalterBright
1105 days ago
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The idea is to store all times as time_t in UCT, and do all time calculations in UTC. Do conversions to/from local time only as a first and last step. It's the only sane way to do it. The D runtime library does that, and it has proven to be robust and sane. We're also recommending that users do the same thing with different character representations - do all calculation and processing in UTF-8. Other sets are translated upon input into UTF-8, and the UTF-8 is translated to other character sets only on output. |
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Cool.
Now how do you enforce that? Spoiler: have the local-time be reported as a TimestampWithTimeZone.
When you're doing calculations, make them all Timestamps.
When you're done, you can remember that you've converted from internal UTC-timestamps into the proper output format because you'll have a TimestampWithTimezone again.
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We're programmers. We have problems that are simple and enforceable through compiler constructs called "The Type System".
Why have the human figure out if they have time-zone back-and-forth correctly or otherwise made a mistake (ex: adding code to the wrong "part of the process" and accidentally mucking with a TimestampWithTimeZone input/output variable rather than the internal Timestamp-UTC-only type variables?)
Just... leave the job of checking this entire process to the compiler. If your n00b coworker messes up, the type system catches it and we're all set.