A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Oct 3, 2021 19:52 UTC (Sun) by perennialmind (guest, #45817)
In reply to: A fork for the time-zone database? by Jonno
Parent article: A fork for the time-zone database?

When working with intervals, it's often desirable to establish a convention leaving one side open. With time, it's generally: start, inclusive and end, exclusive. With that view, noon falls unambiguously in the latter half of the day: pm.

The best I can say in defense of the clock's modulo-12 residue starting system at 1 is that it's not technically wrong, merely suboptimal.

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Oct 3, 2021 20:10 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

This just yet another problem of counting from 1 and not 0.

There would be no am/pm inconsistency if 12h clocks counted from 0:

0:00am 1:00am ... 11:00am 0:00pm 1:00pm ... 11:00pm

When the zero was invented, tens and hundreds and thousands started from 0 but units kept starting at 1 for obvious "backward compatibility" reasons. This is the root cause of many inconsistencies and why 24h clocks and most programming languages switched to counting from zero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering