Re: [tz] Ambiguous abbreviations for Australian timezones when daylight savings is in affect

On Apr 2, 2013, at 8:04 AM, Arthur David Olson <arthurdavidolson@gmail.com> wrote:

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.)

...and the _tzname[] array in the Microsoft Visual C run-time library supplies long names, not abbreviations, as I remember. (How rude a surprise it would be for a UN*X's system library to do so is another matter.)