On Sat, Jan 14, 2023 at 12:51:31AM -0500, Tom Gillespie wrote:
> Without wading too far into this at the moment,
> timezones are an extremely tricky problem with
> a whole bunch of design considerations. I am
> reproducing the heading comment from laundry's
> timestamp.rkt in its entirety here. Best!
> Tom
> 
> https://github.com/tgbugs/laundry/blob/master/laundry/grammar/timestamp.rkt

[...]

> ; are two cases, one where the location is clear, "napoleon on [1812-01-01]"
> ; and the other where it is not, the issue is that a single date refers

Where location also includes time, sometimes (think DSTs). IMO, a timezone
is nice for added context, but meaningless without a concrete offset wrt
some agreed upon base (UTC, here on Earth, for example). Unless you use
clearly different shorthands (e.g. CST for Central Standard Time [1]
and CDT for Central Daylight Time).

The nice cherry on top of that is that this context info is sometimes
relevant and sometimes not. A regular appointment ("brush teeth") may
want to be seen relative to the current time zone (so it "moves" when
I travel from Berlin to New York), another ("Jitsi meeting with my
colleagues in Delhi, Dar-Es-Salam and Denpasar") might not.

I warmly recommend the Wikipedia page [2] on that topic.

An interesting problem :)

Cheers

[1] Eh. Nevermind that it also can mean Cuba Standard Time or China
   Standard Time.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone

-- 
t