🚀 go-pugleaf

tml@tik.vtt.fi (Tor Lillqvist) writes:

>> elsn4000@bronto.zrz.tu-berlin.de (Frank Elsner) writes:
>>      -0100 WAT  West Africa Time
>>      -0200 AT   Azores Time

>You should definitely *not* use exotic time zone names such as these.

Especially since that ``exotic'' list is wrong;
don't trust those old lists taken from astrology books!
E.g. west Africa is really +0000, and the Azores are +0000 (-0100 in summer).
(My source is the 1989 US Naval Observatory listing.)

For Internet mail and news, Lillqvist is right: you should use numeric
time zone offsets, and you must never generate alphabetic names like
`JST' or `MEZ' that aren't in the RFCs.  Numeric time zone offsets are
better than time zone names in general, but if your application must
use time zone names, you should get better sources than old astrology
textbooks or ancient email from Multics maintainers.  I recommend
Arthur David Olson's time zone package, which you can FTP from
elsie.nci.nih.gov in pub/tz92c.tar.Z.