Garrett Wollman wrote:
(I imagine most French-speaking areas outside continental France make little distinction beyond ``heure locale'' and ``heure de New-York'' etc. -- and the English-language initialisms found in the tz database are of little value.)
Well, inside continental France, we have two concurrent uses: - the traditional system, which is "Heure de Xxx", where Xxx is either the name of a main town or of the geographical region ("Heure de l'Inde" for +0530 is the traditional example); - the modern system, in use by the agencies in charge of this (like "Bureau des E'phe'me'rides"), which is "T.U. + n" (or "TU + n"), where n is a number (T.U. means temps universel, that's UT in English). As we see, this is more akind from the ISO 8601 system than from the POSIX-like abbreviations... I do not know what are the use in Belgium, Switzerland, or the other French-speaking part of the the world. For Canada, there is a comment by Alain LaBonte' in northamerica that describes the abbreviations they are using.
I'm curious, though... I know the tz library and database is in use by several commercial vendors with extensive localization programs (e.g., Sun). Do those vendors make an effort to translate the tz strings as well, so that `EST' and `EDT' in locale fr_CA come out `HNE' and `HAE'? If so, do they do it by providing a completely localized tz database, or a locally-localized one, or by applying some post-processing on the (English) strings in the standard database?
I do not know. But in the Java libraries I looked at (some years ago), there were the concept of time zone abbreviations, without translations Even to the well-known Canadian abbreviations are not covered in ICU, <URL:http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/localeexplorer/en/...> Bottom line: it looks like that with computers, abbreviations are not often "localized", and that people stay with the ISO 8601 format instead (when not using English). Of course, GMT is a blatant counter-example! Antoine