🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Oct23.082900.2436@spectre.apana.org.au>
rjl@spectre.apana.org.au (Richard Lindner) writes:

| this may well be a FAQ, but what is the accepted abbreviation for the
| Australian timezones?

EST CST and WST

If you really want to, you can stick "Australian" on the front,
just as you can stick "United States" in front of their EST, but
its not part of the name.

| O'Reilly & Assocs "Nutshell" UUCP guides use
| AEST & AESST for normal and summer times respectively on the east coast

I suepect they dug that out of the news date parsing routines, which
were cobbled together out of an attempt to parse anything anyone had
ever seen...

AEST makes about as much sense as USEST (which you won't find listed),
AESST is simply nonsense, "standard summer" time is an oxymoron, its
EST in winter, and its still EST in summer (its just "summer" time then
instead of "standard" time the rest of the year).

| i note that most posters use GMT as a base standard - is this
| considered correct?

That's the users news software, not the users - GMT is unambiguous,
so its good to use where you need unambiguous times.

What you should use depends on where you're going to use it, if
its for program consumption, or interchange, using GMT makes lots
of sense - if its just for display to users, and no-one is going
to want to reconstruct the absolute time from it, then use EST,
or whatever the user prefers to see (make it configureable).  If
it has to serve both purposes, best is probably to use local time,
with the timeone expressed in its numeric form (+1000 or +1100 
for EST).

kre