February 2, 2016
MarkBernstein.org
 

A Word About Dates

Tinderbox dates always represent a moment in time. When you type a date like “February 3, 2016” into Tinderbox, the program supplies a specific time by using your current clock time. At worst, this is arbitrary but plausible; if you cared about the time, of course, you’d enter the time. Some edge cases work well this way, too: the date “yesterday” is 24 hours before now.

This causes trouble, though, for historical dates – dates before the introduction of time zones and the International Date Line. As I understand things, each locale knows when time zones were legally introduced; before that date, times are assumed to be Universal Standard Time. This means that, for at least part of the day, when you type "February 3, 1776,” you’ll get February 2.

There must be a better way. Anyone know?