>
> I disagree. TIME is a specific domain.

every datatypes are specific.

>
> There simply is NO such thing as 28:00 in a TIME type.

Yes, becuse it is a must.
Have you ever try to store 13. month to any date?
You can't! because there is a rule, months can be max 12.
if your calculation cause a number over 12 you wants to a add
this overflow into years.
same for time.
time doesn't interested about calendar.
it looks like a wheel of car. wheel doesn't interested about your
km console. counting wheel tours is your problem, wheel's duty
is turning around its center.
TIME is not a cosmic static point!
if there is no start(referance) point, then any point do no sense.
TIME is a counter info about any action.
nobody knows univarsal/cosmos real-TIME.
So, we are, as humans, using some intervals to solve syncronisation
problems.
Only GOD(if exists) knows real-TIMESTAMP.
all TIME and calendar calculations are user/human specific intervals.

>
> This is where TIME is different from "smallint" to "bigint".
>

There is no difference for us. we are not amatour computer users,
we are computer experts and must to know how computers/calculations
work.

TIME is a numeric datatype stored in specific format to dislplay
fastly.

TIME is an integer (also may be a float if you want)
most significant bits took hours(to be sortable), others took
minutes,seconds,milliseconds or microseconds or nanoseconds or
picoseconds...(needs BIGINT)
You can display it without any calculation(other than binary to
ASCII convertion, it is valid for all numeric datatypes)
But if there is any calculation with it, you should to convert it
to an monoblock integer number.
there is another way to calculate TIME and DATE but much more
expensive and difficult.
I wrote alot of TIME,DATE calculation functions in C,RPG,etc, when i
was young. there was no source or internet.(only ansiklopedies)
if you know a quick way about TIME,DATE,TIMESTAMP calculation,
i will happy to learn it from you.

Regards.
Ali