The Chronos Date/Time Library

[Alan L. Lovejoy]

Paul,

Your description is accurate conceptually, but not "physically":

Chronos is a Smalltalk date/time class library.  The Chronos time zone
compiler is a Smalltalk program, based on (but separate from) the Chronos
Date/Time Library, that compiles tz source into text files whose format is
proprietary (one time zone per file.) There is another Chronos-based utility
program (also Smalltalk,) separate from the Chronos time zone compiler, and
which has no dependencies thereon, that generates an XML-encoded
representation of the information in the Chronos time zone repository (the
output is a single XML instance document.)

At some point in the future, the code that generates the XML representation
will be enhanced so that it can also generate binary tz files suitable for
use with tzcode-based Unix systems.  Also, the code that retrieves time zone
information for use by Chronos will be enhanced so that it will be able to
read from binary tzfiles (as produced by zic) in order to initialize Chronos
time zone objects in memory. Neither of those things will be hard to do.

Whether the conceptual description is "good enough," or whether the physical
description would be better, I'll leave to your judgement.

--Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 1:31 PM
To: Alan L. Lovejoy
Cc: tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov
Subject: Re: The Chronos Date/Time Library

> From: Alan L. Lovejoy [mailto:architect at chronos-st.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2007 5:43 AM

> <http://www.chronos-st.org/>  (http://www.chronos-st.org/)

Thanks for the pointer.  I've been meaning to write you about that for a
bit.  Is the following summary accurate?

   <li>The <a href="http://www.chronos-st.org/">Chronos Date/Time
   Library</a> is a <a href="http://smalltalk.org/">Smalltalk</a> class
   library that compiles <code>tz</code> source into a <a
   href="http://date-time-zone.com/">time zone repository</a> whose format
   is either proprietary or an <a href="http://www.w3.org/XML/"><abbr
   title="Extensible Markup Language">XML</abbr></a>-encoded
   representation.</li>