David Patte ₯ <dpatte@relativedata.com> writes:
The original reason for the latest discussion was actually precipitaed from a request of clarity into why Greenland time zone designator was changed from GST/WGST to -3. The original author said that he felt GST/WGST was in common usage.
I think the abbreviations are a much different issue than the zone identifiers, and I'd personally love to see them go away completely (even ones like PDT). I know that's too radical to be practical, but those three or four character abbreviations are traps for the unwary. There aren't enough places to put disclaimers about them, people constantly assume they're unique when they're not, and I've found far, far too many buggy date parsers that try to extract meaning from them. Replacing as many of them as possible with simple offset indications or some other mostly meaningless string is a service to future programmers as far as I'm concerned. -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>