Re: encode-time vs decode-time

[Paul Eggert]

Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> "Broken-down time" sounds OK to me, although there may be some
> confusion: Some may assume that it's a faulty time or something.

Yes, I'm not a big fan of "broken-down time" either. Its main advantages are (1) 
we can't think of a better name and (2) it's used elsewhere in GNU and POSIX.

> And when we get to the accessor names, it perhaps gets even more
> potentially confusing:
>
> (broken-down-seconds time)
> (broken-down-zone time)
>
> Hm...  Perhaps not ideal?

The POSIX identifier for broken-down time is 'tm', as in 'struct tm'. We could 
steal that identifier too, e.g., (tm-seconds time), (tm-zone time), etc. Again, 
not ideal, but perhaps better than (broken-down-seconds time). If the prefix 
'tm-' is too short, we could expand it to 'time-tm-' or something like that.