One other factoid: the C language standard calls for various formatting functions to produce "the locale’s time zone name or abbreviation, or by no characters if no time zone is determinable." (Some history: early draft language standards specified "time zone name;" a proposal to change to "time zone abbreviation" was rejected; "name or abbreviation" is where things landed.) @dashdashado On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 10:21 AM, <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 2, 2013, at 1:27, Robert Elz wrote:
As to why the actual value EST is used, it is because (at least) the Victorian legislation (and it is Victoria where these acronyms were first inserted into unix systems for Aust - that eventually moved them into tzdata) the legislation contains the names "Eastern Standard Time" and "Eastern Summer Time".
No, it doesn't. ADO just posted a link to it, and the word "Eastern" appears not once within. The time zone has no name. By that measure, we should change it to MELT/MELST.
The comonwealth govt in Aust is not responsible for anything (outside ACT, and perhaps NT) (time, acronyms, what you eat for breakfast ...) unless either the Aust constitution, or some enabling delegation from one of the state governments says it is so.
"Trade and commerce with other countries, and among the States"
How to refer to the time zone of one state from another, from outside the country, or how to make a reference (published from witthin one state) to a state's timezone for people in other states or other countries to see, arguably qualifies.
Personally I'd be quite happy (but please do not treat this as a request, or even a serious suggestion, it is not) if we were to set all of the acronyms, in all of the zones (in Aust and all other places) to ZZZ.
Why not set them to "+10:00" [etc], so that %Z can become as useful as %z?
There's no fundamental reason people shouldn't be able to print time zone information. And for a portable C program (assuming C11 is not supported), %Z is the only available means to do so.
Strictly, there's nothing requiring %Z to be related to tzname, so it could even still do the +10:00 even if tzname has been set to an alphabetic string by parsing a POSIX-style TZ value.