Re: Comment on timezone and interval types

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Bruno Wolff III wrote:
| On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 11:14:31 -0600,
| Guy Fraser <guy(at)incentre(dot)net> wrote:
|
|>1 day should always be calculated as 24 hours, just as an hour
|>is calculated as 60 minutes...
|
|
| If you want 24 hours you can use 24 hours. Days are not constant length,
| just like months aren't constant length.

Days *are* of constant length - check your nearest dictionary, which
will define it as 24 hours or the period of rotation of the earth. If
people see 'day', they think '24 hours' because that is the definition
they have been using since preschool. This breeds sleeping bugs that
nobody notices until the DST transition kicks in and events happen an
hour late or not at all.

What you are talking about is useful, but should be called calendar_day
or something that makes it obvious that it isn't using the traditional
definition.

People are used to months being ambiguous so it is less likely to cause
upsets, although it still bites people because their toolkits definition
of 'month' does not match their business rules of 'month' (which might
be 30 days, 31 days, 4 weeks, calendar month rounded down).

- --
Stuart Bishop <stuart(at)stuartbishop(dot)net>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/
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