On 09/04/13 11:21, Steve Allen wrote:
But ordinary
users won't care that time stamps in Aruba on February 12, 1912 from 04:35:47 to 04:40:24 UTC will have a UTC offset that differs by a few minutes. They just won't. I request caution in making it clear to ordinary users that the name UTC cannot be proleptically extended to dates prior to 1960. No such concept existed in contemporary records.
Yeowch! You're right; sorry about that. I should have written "GMT". I was misled by zdump's output. Should we change the output of "zdump" etc to fix this error? Currently zdump says "UTC" for old time stamps, which isn't correct. Should it say "UT" instead? Or is even "UT" a bad idea for a time stamp in (say) 1627? I also should have mentioned that even with GMT, my comment was incorrect in some sense. Common practice back then for Dutch possessions was to use non-integer offsets from GMT, and the tz format cannot represent these. I don't have good data for Aruba, but Capt. Thomas Henry Tizard of the Royal Navy reported that Curacao's port kept time at -04:35:46.9; see Milne 1899.