<div dir="ltr"><div><div>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."<br>
<br></div>(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.)<br>
<br></div> @dashdashado<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 10:21 AM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:random832@fastmail.us" target="_blank">random832@fastmail.us</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="im">On Tue, Apr 2, 2013, at 1:27, Robert Elz wrote:<br>
> As to why the actual value EST is used, it is because (at least) the<br>
> Victorian legislation (and it is Victoria where these acronyms were first<br>
> inserted into unix systems for Aust - that eventually moved them into<br>
> tzdata) the legislation contains the names "Eastern Standard Time" and<br>
> "Eastern Summer Time".<br>
<br>
</div>No, it doesn't. ADO just posted a link to it, and the word "Eastern"<br>
appears not once within. The time zone has no name. By that measure, we<br>
should change it to MELT/MELST.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
<br>
> The comonwealth govt in Aust is not responsible for anything (outside<br>
> ACT,<br>
> and perhaps NT) (time, acronyms, what you eat for breakfast ...) unless<br>
> either the Aust constitution, or some enabling delegation from one of the<br>
> state governments says it is so.<br>
<br>
</div>"Trade and commerce with other countries, and among the States"<br>
<br>
How to refer to the time zone of one state from another, from outside<br>
the country, or how to make a reference (published from witthin one<br>
state) to a state's timezone for people in other states or other<br>
countries to see, arguably qualifies.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Personally I'd be quite happy (but please do not treat this as a request,<br>
> or even a serious suggestion, it is not) if we were to set all of the<br>
> acronyms, in all of the zones (in Aust and all other places) to ZZZ.<br>
<br>
</div>Why not set them to "+10:00" [etc], so that %Z can become as useful as<br>
%z?<br>
<br>
There's no fundamental reason people shouldn't be able to print time<br>
zone information. And for a portable C program (assuming C11 is not<br>
supported), %Z is the only available means to do so.<br>
<br>
Strictly, there's nothing requiring %Z to be related to tzname, so it<br>
could even still do the +10:00 even if tzname has been set to an<br>
alphabetic string by parsing a POSIX-style TZ value.<br>
</blockquote></div><br></div>