(1) minutes east/west and (2) aust time

[Snoopy]

I've been watching the discussion on minuteswest vs minuteseast,
and there's a point that I haven't seen brought up yet.

The math is a bit less confusing if you use minuteseast.  I modified
date(1) to allow setting the timezone to any number of minutes west of
GMT you want.  It was a bit confusing typing "date -z 2:15" and having
date print out something like "Fri Feb 20 20:00:00 GMT-2:15 1987".
(Notice the sign change!)  Turns out that if you take the time in
GMT and add minutesEAST, you get the correct time for your zone.

			west		GMT		east
wall clock time		10:00	11:00	12:00	 1:00	 2:00
minuteswest/60		 2	 1	 0	-1	-2
minuteseast/60		-2	-1	 0	 1	 2

Other than the pain of converting existing software, it appears
that minuteseast is a better choice.

-----------------

Also, does anyone know the correct timezone names for Australia?
The following is from 4.3 timezone.c:

	-10*60, "EST", "EST",		/* Aust: Eastern */
	-10*60+30, "CST", "CST",	/* Aust: Central */
	-8*60, "WST", 0,		/* Aust: Western */

It seems a bit odd to be that there is no indication of daylight time
(e.g. EDT, CDT) except for the western zone, which gives "GMT+8:00"
during their summer.  I find it hard to believe that the
Australians refer to their timezone as "GMT+8:00".

Snoopy
tektronix!doghouse.gwd!snoopy
snoopy at doghouse.gwd.tek.com