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Re: AbsoluteTime and Daylight Saving Time

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg111759] Re: AbsoluteTime and Daylight Saving Time
  • From: David Skulsky <edskulsky at gmail.com>
  • Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 05:31:11 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <i3bd1u$pbm$1@smc.vnet.net>

On Aug 4, 2:48 am, David Skulsky <edskul... at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Mathematica documentation states that "AbsoluteTime[] uses
> whatever date and time have been set on your computer system.  It
> performs no corrections for time zones, daylight saving time, etc."
> This statement confuses me.  When I execute the following commands on
> my machine (Mathematica 7 running under Mac OS 10.6.4) it appears that
> AbsoluteTime is accounting for DST since the two AbsoluteTime commands
> return the same value for times that differ by 1 hour (at the DST
> transition).
>
> datestr = {"Day", "MonthNameShort", "Year", "Hour24", "Minute",
>    "SecondExact"};
>
> AbsoluteTime[{"13 Mar 2016 02:00:00.000", datestr}]
> 3666826800
>
> AbsoluteTime[{"13 Mar 2016 03:00:00.000", datestr}]
> 3666826800
>
> So I thought I'd try to specify the time zone using the TimeZone->0
> option in the AbsoluteTime command, but that didn't appear to solve
> the problem (i.e., both calls to AbsoluteTime still return the same
> value, though it differs from the previous calls to AbsoluteTime by
> the offset associated with my local time zone).  I thought that
> specifying the time zone would remove any compensation for DST, since
> DST seems to be accounted for by adjusting the time zone.
>
> Can somebody help me understand what's going on?
>
> Thanks,
>
> David Skulsky

I just wanted to mention that I asked Wolfram Tech Support about this
and they confirmed that this is a bug in the Macintosh version of
Mathematica.

David


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