On 10 Jan 2001, Paul Eggert wrote:
1. Is there an "official list" of all the names or labels used to designated time zones
No, unfortunately. And in practice, the names are ambiguous. For example, "IST" means UTC+2 in Israel, but UTC+5:30 in India.
I have to take responsibility for that ambiguity as I coined "IST/IDT" circa 1988. Until then there were three different abbreviations in use: JST Jerusalem Standard Time [Danny Braniss, Hebrew University] IZT Israel Zonal (sic) Time [Prof. Haim Papo, Technion] EEST Eastern Europe Standard Time [used by almost everyone else] Since timezones should be called by country and not capital cities, I ruled out JST. As Israel is in Asia Minor and not Eastern Europe, EEST was equally unacceptable. Since "zonal" was not compatible with any other timezone abbreviation, I felt that 'IST' was the way to go and, indeed, it has received almost universal acceptance in timezone settings in Israeli computers. In any case, I am happy to share timezone abbreviations with India, high on my favorite-country list (and not only because my wife's family is from India). ___________________________________________________________________________ Ephraim Silverberg, CSE System Group, Phone number: 972-2-6585521 Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. Fax number: 972-2-6585439 WWW: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~ephraim E-mail: ephraim@cse.huji.ac.il