Guido van Rossum writes:
10pm EST has a different feel to it than one sent at 4am MET. It should *sort* on UTC, but it should use the original timezone to display the dates.
[Fred]
Sounds like a user preference, not a universal truth.
Fair enough. Even some of my well-traveled friends cannot do timezone arithmetic in their head... :-)
Is it important that the timezone is part of the date/time type, though? Is it important that it be part of the abstract base date/time?
Specific implementations should certainly be able to add support for timezones, and perhaps some hypothetical default date/time type should include it for convenience, but that doesn't tell me it's fundamental.
I guess I want it to be possible to have an implementation that keeps track of the timezone as entered. It's true that time deltas are a nightmare when dealing with different timezones. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)