Deborah Pickett schrieb am 10.11.2008 um 22:56:30 (+1100):
Michael Ludwig wrote:
[...] I haven't yet encountered a system that doesn't do local time
and makes this functionality available to applications.
I think that this is the root of our differing opinions. I'd buy your
argument if we restricted ourselves to "fat" operating systems like the
general-purpose commercial or open-source ones that you name. On such
systems, the XPath runtime can delegate time zone computations to the OS
(essentially the set of known time zone names becomes part of the
context of the expression). The amount of work needed to be done by the
XPath processor is pretty small.
What I don't buy is the assumption that XPath is always going to run on
such "fat" platforms. XPath is useful in embedded situations that might
have no reason to know about time zones. Consider an SVG renderer built
into a printer. Or a network router with its config files stored as XML
(my router does just that). Such implementations need not even have a
real-time clock. For them, having to implement XPath 2.0
fn:adjust-dateTime-to-timezone() is an imposition, but not a huge one.
The function is, after all, just glorified arithmetic in a weird base.
Hi Deborah,
this is true, and a good objection. I hadn't thought about such small
systems that aren't even fully time-aware. And it's true that the
adjust-*-to-timezone functions are purely arithmetic, so even such small
systems can implement them.
Thanks,
Michael Ludwig
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