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Comment by strictfp | Hacker News Reader

Author here. I built this primarily to perform time-sheet calculations and to figure out what time it is in different cities easily when talking to friends overseas.

The site is the culmination of my experimentation with parsers, and specifically my last little Java TDOP parser library bychan (https://github.com/atorstling/bychan).

Please criticize / ask any questions and/or suggest anything below.

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Looks OK.

Now looking at the examples, the answer for "now in zone Lisbon" gives

2015-07-13T13:31:47.968+01:00[Europe/Lisbon]

Why not just "today, 14:31:47, Lisbon"? If I enter the expression I don't actually like receiving the expression as the answer. Also, the whole "expression" of the translation of the question is displayed, when most probably the user doesn't need it every time, and then it's initially confusing.

Thanks for your feedback. I agree that the representation is suboptimal. I will work on this if there is interest in the site. Regarding the ast representation, I will think about making it optional.

https://xkcd.com/1179/

BTW: what does "today" mean when your wall clock shows e.g. 23:25:00? Is it "today in Lisbon" or "today at your timezone"?

I agree, it can be confusing too. At least as long as the "today" is the same on both places, it's clear. I'd keep the full date when it's not today on both places.

And do you prefer the current:

2015-07-13T13:31:47.968+01:00[Europe/Lisbon]

or something simpler?

Yet, the mouse over text for the comic says "ISO 8601 was published on 06/05/88 and most recently amended on 12/01/04."

Is this irony?

Probably not. Nothing is ever irony.

Duratio actually kinda adresses this for time instants. If you enter "now" you get an instant. You can move it around the time axis and show its value at a specific zone by using "in zone PST" or similar. So if you enter "now PST" the timezone is considered redundant information and you get an error. But if you say "2013-01-10 PST" it parses. The conversion can be performed by entering "2013-01-10 pst in zone cet".

"today" and similar expressions are calculated in CET. I was considering customizing this or adding syntax for it, but it was de-scoped for the initial release.

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