A built-in timestamp type that stores both the UTC time, the originating timezone IANA name, and the timezone offset. Without loss.
"it was 2:01am on November 5th, in America/Los_Angeles and the offset was -7"
"it was 2:01am on November 5th, in America/Los_Angeles and the offset was -7"
"it was 2:01am on November 5th, in America/Los_Angeles and the offset was -7 (retrieved from ICU v97)"
E.G. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5545#section-3.8.5.3 (Internet Calendar) still has the issue of events not tied to the time a 'normal' human might expect if rules change.
Lunch service 11am to 3pm Weekdays, 11 to 2pm Weekends
How would that dynamically map to changes in the timezones that might be mandated by the law but reflect the correct event times in a scheduling system? Spreadsheet systems developed the $ prefix for cell addresses as a shorthand to lock that in when adjusting the relative offsets in copy and paste / duplicate operations.
2. What is the collation (sorting algorithm) for this datatype?