<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 7 June 2016 at 04:44, Paul Eggert <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eggert@cs.ucla.edu" target="_blank">eggert@cs.ucla.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Alternatively, zdump could not bother to align outlandish years outside the range -999,9999 or outlandish UT offsets that are more than 100 hours away from UT.</blockquote><div><br>Though all of the space-padding alternatives you propose do have their
limitations, as you mention, I think this is the one that remains most workable and portable.<br><br>In fact, if you include
colons in the UT offsets, you need only state
that the datetime and offset fields are given with second-level precision, and that all terminal sequences of the substring "<span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">:00</span>" within those fields are replaced with three spaces to aid
readability.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Something like that might work, I suppose, though we'd probably still get bug reports from compulsive aligners wondering why the outlandish cases aren't aligned properly, or why there's all that white space in the columns.</blockquote></div><br>"Compulsive aligners" will always find something to
complain about, surely… but maybe if the stated goal isn't so much absolute "alignment" as general "readability", they might pick on something else instead.<br><br clear="all"><div><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">--<br>Tim Parenti<br></div></div>
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