<html><head></head><body>Wouldn't MCK+4 be interpreted by a POSIX TZ variable as 4 hours behind UTC? That seems like it would be quite confusing, especially since it's just a numerical reference to a different zone (i.e. I don't see how it's any better than naming the zone by its offset, in the absence of a proper local practice).<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On May 26, 2016 9:44:22 AM EDT, Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">On Thu, May 26, 2016, at 07:18, Victor Sudakov wrote:<br /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #ad7fa8; padding-left: 1ex;"> Look at the law: the official time zone name for Tomsk is: 6-я<br /> часовая зона (If utf-8 is working, then you'll see Russian in<br /> Cyrillic letters.) The English translation is: 6th hourly zone (6th<br /> timezone).<br /></blockquote><br /> This same law "107-ФЗ Об исчислении времени" also provides an official<br /> alias "МСК+4" for this timezone. But we cannot use non-ascii<br /> characters for time zone names in tzdata, can we?<br /></blockquote><br />If "МСК+#"-style abbreviations were *official*, I think that should be<br />enough justification to use "MSK+#"-style ascii abbreviations. However,<br />the context they!
appear
in in the law seems informational to me; it's in<br />the same parentheses as UTC+#.<br /><br />Oddly enough, nothing in the C or POSIX/Unix standards *actually* says<br />anything about time zone names (which are consistently referred to as<br />names, not abbreviations) being abbreviated. It's merely inferred from<br />historical practice, along with the fact that in POSIX in the TZ<br />variable they (obnoxiously, for no stated reason) cannot contain spaces.<br />This prohibition does *not* extend to what may appear in tzname if TZ is<br />in the :tzid format.<br /><br />Incidentally, MSVC's time functions on Windows use fully spelled<br />out names.<br /></pre></blockquote></div></body></html>