🚀 go-pugleaf

I enquired about internationalizing date/time strings in mail, particularly
in mail headers.  

First, it was pointed out that RFC822 is no longer the final word; one must
also consult RFC1123.  In particular, RFC1123 says that the "military"
time zones described in RFC822 are all wrong, and promotes the use of +/-HHMM
time zone designations.  This use of +/-HHMM was almost universally recommended
by the respondents, even for North America.  The time zone names (e.g. EST)
are anything but unique.  The traditional time zone name can be included
on the date line as a comment, if desired (assuming it doesn't have any
8-bit characters).

On the issue of Daylight Savings Time:  as one respondent put it, using
the +/-HHMM designations will "finesse" the DST issue.  Of course, I should
have realized this, since these don't describe your time zone in terms of
location, but merely in terms of time difference from GMT.  It does mean
that at different times of year, your mail will have a different time zone
designation (-0500 vs -0400, for example).

Craig Everhart also said, about code to produce this kind of date string:
> The code for this is freely available as part of the Andrew contribution
> to the X.V11R4 tape, in .../andrew/overhead/mail/lib/arpadate.c .  

David Stone sent me more than I ever wanted to know about time zone names.

Thanks to the many folks who replied:

From: Hans Henrik Eriksen <hhe@ifi.uio.no>
From: Christopher-Vance@adfa.oz.au
From: Robert Claeson <prc@erbe.se>
From: Stig Hemmer <stig@lise.unit.no>
From: Craig_Everhart@transarc.com
From:     David Stone <DSTONE@WL9.Prime.COM>
From: mac@dit.upm.es (Manuel Alvarez-Campana Fernandez-Corredor)
From: ckd@cs.bu.edu
From: eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
From: parghi@cs.uiuc.edu (Amit Parghi)

An an indirect thanks to these folks, whose words were forwarded to me:
From: Erik-Jan Bos -- SURFnet BV <BOS%SURFnet.NL@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
From:  Gary Dixon <GDixon@HIS-PHOENIX-MULTICS.ARPA>

-- 
Topher Eliot
Data General Corporation                eliot@dg-rtp.dg.com
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Obviously, I speak for myself, not for DG.