Shank's International Atlas [forwarded with permission from eggert at twinsun.com]

[Arthur David Olson]

> From twinsun!twinsun.com!eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU Tue Oct 19 18:07:51 1993
> Return-Path: <twinsun!twinsun.com!eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU>
> ...
> From: eggert at twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
> Message-Id: <9310192204.AA24829 at spot.twinsun.com>
> Date: 19 Oct 1993 15:04:24 -0700
> To: ado at elsie.nci.nih.gov
> In-Reply-To: <9310192039.AA26353 at elsie.nci.nih.gov> (ado at elsie.nci.nih.gov)
> Subject: Re: Shanks's International Atlas
> ...
> 
>        That being so, we'd want to be on the lookout for rare timekeeping
>        changes and be sure to include them.
> 
> Yes, definitely.  (Ireland was an eye-opener for me.)
> 
>    2.  A pragmatic answer to how many zones to have for France is "as many as
>        are needed to describe the present day zones."  As you noted, though,
>        doing even this at the country level yields lots of zones.
> 
> If we were to do this, we'd need a convention to help decide which of the 153
> zone histories we'd present as `France'.  I see two plausible options: pick
> the present-day capital (i.e. Paris), or pick the most typical and widely-used
> (for France, this would probably be Shanks's French Time Zone #1, which I
> believe is the time zone history of the un-fought-over boondocks during the
> two world wars).
> 
>    3.  As a last resort, simply reporting UCT for a zone when it's doing
>        something awkward is a possibility.
> 
> If by `awkward' you mean LMT, I'd prefer using standard time instead, since
> it's less of an error.  E.g. if we use the district's present-day capital for
> (2), then we could use the capital's LMT for times before standard time was
> instituted.
> 
> If we use present-day capitals, I think it'd be far more honest to give time
> zone files names like `Paris' and `Berlin' instead of `France' and `Germany'.
> This is reminiscent of the interface used in the HP 100LX palmtops -- they ask
> you what city you're in, not what country you're in.