[Datetime-SIG] Clearing up terminology

[Chris Barker - NOAA Federal]

By the way, sorry tone so inattentive as not to notice the +1000 next
to that EST! Muddied the waters s bit...

CHB

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 29, 2015, at 6:16 PM, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal
<chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

>> Fair enough: "EST is a offset", what is +1000 then?
>
> Also an offset -- but one without a name -- In the general case, a
> given offset may have more than one name.
>
> EST is one name for a +5 offset. (Or is it minus 5?) but there are
> other times on other timezones where the offset is 5.
>
>> $ TZ=Australia/Melbourne date +"%c %Z%z"
>> Thu Jul 30 10:46:45 2015 AEST+1000
>>
>> The point, however is that "EST" does not mean -0500 for everyone.
>
> Showing my US centrism here!
>
> If we're getting into naming schemes here, it clearly gets ugly --
> honestly I have no idea whether AEST is an name for an offset or a
> timezone. So when I said there can be more than one name for a given
> offset, there can also be more than one offset for a given name.
>
> Personally, I'm not really interested in the names, and the naming
> issue is orthogonal to the rest of this discussion.
>
> But I presume the Olson database has a naming scheme...
>
> -CHB