Gwillim Law said:
When I was a data administrator, one of the most fundamental principles I learned was not to try to embed one field as a code inside another one. [...] (Some programmers love to think up tricks like that, in order to save a line or two of code.) It's just not a good data design. The tz database contains a field that's defined as the offset from standard time, and it's expressed as a time, not a letter code. Force the programmers to use that field. Never suggest that the next-to-last letter can be used instead.
Hear, hear. These abbreviations are there for hysterical raisins (as we used to call it in my youth). They're already fundamentally broken - trying to add structure to them is doomed. -- Clive D.W. Feather | If you lie to the compiler, Email: clive@davros.org | it will get its revenge. Web: http://www.davros.org | - Henry Spencer Mobile: +44 7973 377646