SRFI 285: Dates and Times

by Peter McGoron (steward, corresponding author), John Cowan (original design), Daphne Preston-Kendal (design and specification), and Arvydas Silanskas (implementation)

status: draft (2026-09-20)

keywords: Data Structure

See also SRFI 19: Time Data Types and Procedures and SRFI 174: POSIX Timespecs.

library name: date-and-time

Abstract

This SRFI details an API for storing and manipluating dates and times. This SRFI decomposes dates and times into dates (a count of days in the proleptic Gregorian calendar), clock times (time of day, independent of time zone), moments (instants in TAI), timezones (a possibly dynamic offset from UTC), timestamps (a date, clock time,and timezone), and time deltas (measurement of elapsed time). By doing this, a Scheme program can operate on days in different calendars and timestamps in different timezones.