In order to try to be closer to the spirit of the STL, now the empty strings/vectors/lists are tested with .empty(), the first/last elements of vectors accessed with front()/back(), the empty strings are not contructed with string("") but with string(), etc This makes a benchmark based on meteo_reading ~4% faster and this makes the code suprisingly easier to read. 

Some extra constification took place as well as some minor code cleanup (optimizing the comparison between two vectors in order to perform less tests, etc).

The Date class can now properly generate and parse full ISO timestamps, including time zone information. The full specification is now supported by convertString() with a helper method in the Date class. Ouputing an ISO string with its time zone is done by requesting the ISO_TZ format.