[MAL, on DST for out-of-platform-mktime()-range years]

My point was to not fiddle with the date at all: raise an exception and that's it.

If someone wants to print some datetime object from the year 1537 as if a local time, raising an exception just because the local DST rules in effect at that time are unknown seems extremely unfriendly. For goodness sake, we're already "lying" to them about the calendar system in effect at that time, and an hour more or less due to DST uncertainty is trivial. It's an idealized calendar, and an idealized time. We should supply a way for the user to find out whether or not a DST correction was applied, though. ECMAScript does that via a DaylightSavingTA(t) function mapping UTC time to the number of milliseconds (all their times are in milliseconds) to be added to t to adjust for local DST. A distinct LocalTZA constant gives the number of msecs to add to UTC to adjust for local timezone. Conversion from UTC to local time is defined by LocalTime(t) = t + LocalTZA + DaylightSavingTA(t) Conversion from local time to UTC is defined by UTC(t) = t – LocalTZA – DaylightSavingTA(t – LocalTZA) Note that UTC(LocalTime(t)) is not necessarily always equal to t. That last line gives me an especially warm feeling <wink>. there's-idealized-and-then-there's-idealized-ly y'rs - tim