Is there a standard for inclusive/exclusive ends of time intervals?

In the general case, [A, B) (inclusive start, exclusive end) has a lot going for it and I don’t see any reason why the same wouldn’t be true for time intervals.

Djikstra wrote a nice article about it Why numbering should start at zero which – despite the name – deals mostly with exactly this.

Short summary of the advantages:

• end - start equals the number of items in the list
• upper bound of preceding interval is the lower bound of the next
• allows to index an interval starting from 0 with unsigned numbers [1]

Personally the second point is extremely useful for lots of problems; consider a pretty standard recursive function (in pseudo python):

def foo(start, end):
    if end - start == 1:
        # base case
    else:
        middle = start + (end - start) / 2
        foo(start, middle)
        foo(middle, end)

Writing the same with inclusive upper bound introduces lots of error prone off by one errors.

[1] That’s the advantage compared to (A, B] – a interval starting from 0 is MUCH more common than an interval ending in MAX_VAL. Note that also relates to one additional problem: Using two inclusive bounds means we can denote a sequence whose length cannot be expressed with the same size.