[Datetime-SIG] What's are the issues?

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 1:21 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> But really does anyone really want to do the ugliness of trying to do time
> calculation completely in a time-zone, discontinuous, ugly as hell
> encoding????

Yes, if both the input and the output of your program contain temporal
data in the same timezone.

For example, "Find a day with the largest trading volume on the New
York Stock Exchange in 2014."

The exchange publishes its data in New York local time and you know
that trading hours are from 09:30 to 16:00 with a few exceptions that
are again published in the local time.  The database is huge, so you
select the data by day, split it into chunks by 5 minutes, add up the
volumes for each day
and find maximum.  Easy.  No need to know when the DST transitions
were in New York in 2014.  Got the same database from Paris?  No need
to change your code.  Now try to do the same in UTC.  I think my
program will finish before you stop arguing what "a day" is.