On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 23:29, Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au> wrote:
| Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe most robust implementations of the TZ | database already have some way of expressing an offset in this way.
That isn't the issue. What is of interest for this topic, is what the tz database (and code) should put in the tzname[] array &/or tm_zone field of the struct tm. ...
So, using -04:00 just isn't an option, sorry.
That was precisely my point. While a numeric offset would be meaningful, it's place is simply *not* in the abbreviation designation, for programmatic and practical reasons. On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 06:29, Zefram <zefram@fysh.org> wrote:
FWIW, the POSIX standard for $TZ allows ASCII letters (of either case), digits, "+", and "-" in the abbreviation, and requires the abbreviation to be at least three characters long.
"LST" seems too like the other "meaningful" identifiers that people may try to continue to infer meaning from it. Could we perhaps just use the string "local" for these "non-meaningful" cases, and avoid abbreviations altogether? This all-lowercase string conforms to the POSIX standard as described and would also serve to *clearly* disambiguate from other identifiers like "UTC", while not having to deal with contrived abbreviations. -- Tim Parenti
Tim Parenti wrote:
"LST" seems too like the other "meaningful" identifiers that people may try to continue to infer meaning from it. Could we perhaps just use the string "local" for these "non-meaningful" cases, and avoid abbreviations altogether?
I like the idea of this being all-lowercase. We already have all-lowercase "zzz" for a different special case, and there are no all-lowercase proper abbreviations. -zefram
no confusion with 'local' - like it too On 2011-10-14 10:16, Zefram wrote:
Tim Parenti wrote:
"LST" seems too like the other "meaningful" identifiers that people may try to continue to infer meaning from it. Could we perhaps just use the string "local" for these "non-meaningful" cases, and avoid abbreviations altogether? I like the idea of this being all-lowercase. We already have all-lowercase "zzz" for a different special case, and there are no all-lowercase proper abbreviations.
-zefram
-- No Are you supposed to post replies below the message?
Any reason not to use the military letter zone abbreviations? That at least conveys some information. I suppose something special is still needed for the non-integer offsets... Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey: South or southwest 5 to 7, perhaps gale 8 later in Bailey, veering west 4 for a time. Rough or very rough, occasionally high later in Bailey. Rain or showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.
Tony Finch wrote:
Any reason not to use the military letter zone abbreviations?
Yes: they're shorter than the minimum length (3) of abbreviations for POSIX TZ values, which poses a problem in filling the POSIX-TZ field. But you could do "milA" etc. Actually their origin is nautical, not specifically military, so perhaps "seaA" would be better. -zefram
participants (4)
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David Patte -
Tim Parenti -
Tony Finch -
Zefram