On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 11:40 AM, Alexander Belopolsky < alexander.belopolsky@gmail.com> wrote:

You are the third person on this list who saw

$ TZ=Australia/Melbourne date +"%c%z" Thu 30 Jul 2015 10:21:18 AM EST+1000

and decided that EST is "likely US Eastern Standard Time." And neither of the following two facts have stopped you:

1. Melbourne is in Australia, not in the US.
2. The DST is in effect in the Eastern US in July.

nor that an offset of +1000 is not, and never was or will be the offset for "US Eastern Standard Time."

All good proof that short names for semi timezones is very, very error prone!

(despite the fact that I do it all the time when I write)

I'm pretty sure the iso 8601 spec only puts offsets in the string -- uttin gboth an offset and a abbreviation seems like trouble to me :-)

But we've got a long way to go before we need to bikeshed the __str__ and __repr__ implementations...

-CHB