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time zone range

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Kent M Pitman

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Apr 20, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/20/99
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Sam Steingold <s...@goems.com> writes:

> HyperSpec/Body/glo_t.html#time_zone:
>
> time zone n. a rational multiple of 1/3600 between -24 (inclusive) and
> 24 (inclusive) that represents a time zone as a number of hours offset
> from Greenwich Mean Time. Time zone values increase with motion to the
> west, so Massachusetts, U.S.A. is in time zone 5, California, U.S.A. is
> time zone 8, and Moscow, Russia is time zone -3....
>
> It seems that [-12;12] would be quite enough at the moment.

You'd think so. But timezones are dictated politically--and I don't mean
by the politics of a language design committee, but by an elected body
in each country, or by a dictator, or by whatever it is that makes
politics in each and every jurisdiction. And it was observed that
the numbers vary farther than you suggest.

In fairness to those countries, sometimes it's more useful to certain
countries near the wraparound point to lean one way rather than the
other because the ocean being where it is, it's better to be close to
your geographical neighbors than your mathematically dictated ones.

(Btw, I'm surprised, btw, that you didn't suggest making the interval
open-ended on one side--THAT would have been mathematically minimal.
There are 25 hours in your proposed range.)

Rob Warnock

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Apr 20, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/20/99
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Sam Steingold <s...@goems.com> wrote:
+---------------
| time zone ... a number of hours offset from Greenwich Mean Time.

| Time zone values increase with motion to the west, so Massachusetts,
| U.S.A. is in time zone 5, California, U.S.A. is time zone 8...
+---------------

Why did they do that? Seems backwards from other common notions
of timezones. E.g., RFC 822 mail header date format treats "PST"
(California non-daylight-savings time) and "-0800" the same,
and "PDT" == "-0700", etc.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-855 rp...@sgi.com
Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
2011 N. Shoreline Blvd. FAX: 650-933-0511
Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA

Erik Naggum

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Apr 20, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/20/99
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* rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock)

| Why did they do that? Seems backwards from other common notions
| of timezones. E.g., RFC 822 mail header date format treats "PST"
| (California non-daylight-savings time) and "-0800" the same,
| and "PDT" == "-0700", etc.

also in the greatน Unix tradition, PST is 8 and PDT is 7.

#:Erik
-------
น riiiight

Erik Naggum

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Apr 20, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/20/99
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* Sam Steingold <s...@goems.com>

| It seems that [-12;12] would be quite enough at the moment.

does the the interval ±24 cause you problems of any kind?

BTW, with daylight savings time, Auckland, Australia, is +13.

#:Erik

paul_...@scientia.com

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Apr 21, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/21/99
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In article <31336379...@naggum.no>,
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> wrote:


> BTW, with daylight savings time, Auckland, Australia, is +13.

Auckland is in New Zealand.

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Erik Naggum

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Apr 21, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/21/99
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* paul_...@scientia.com

| Auckland is in New Zealand.

yup. mea culpa. (Eric Marsden corrected me privately, too.)

#:Erik

Erik Naggum

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Apr 21, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/21/99
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* Sam Steingold <s...@goems.com>
| What is this character: "ą"?
| GNU Emacs 20.3.8.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit) displays it as a black
| rectangle. [mule be damned]

ą is the PLUS-MINUS SIGN in the ISO 10646 nomenclature.

(when real mules break something, don't they get shot? :)

#:Erik

Bruno Haible

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Apr 22, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/22/99
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Sam Steingold <s...@goems.com> asked:
> >>
> >> does the the interval ą24 cause you problems of any kind?

>
> What is this character: "ą"?
> GNU Emacs 20.3.8.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit) displays it as a black
> rectangle. [mule be damned]

XEmacs 19.11 displays it as a minus sign under a plus sign. If GNU Emacs
can't tell you what it is, CLISP can:

[1]> (describe #\ą)

#\U00B1 is a character.
Unicode name: PLUS-MINUS SIGN
It is a printable character.
Its use is non-portable.

Using ISO-8859-1 characters literally in news posting is frequently done
by Europeans (like Erik and me), but it is unfair towards Asian people
whose characters cannot be expressed in ISO-8859-1. Erik, I think we should
start encoding our news messages in UTF-8.

Bruno http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/

Kent M Pitman

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Apr 22, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/22/99
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hai...@clisp.cons.org (Bruno Haible) writes:

> > What is this character: "ą"?
> > GNU Emacs 20.3.8.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit) displays it as a black
> > rectangle. [mule be damned]
>
> XEmacs 19.11 displays it as a minus sign under a plus sign. If GNU Emacs
> can't tell you what it is, CLISP can:

I see it as \261. This whole conversation has been incomprehensible.

Erik Naggum

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Apr 23, 1999, 3:00:00 AM4/23/99
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* hai...@clisp.cons.org (Bruno Haible)

| Using ISO-8859-1 characters literally in news posting is frequently done
| by Europeans (like Erik and me), but it is unfair towards Asian people
| whose characters cannot be expressed in ISO-8859-1. Erik, I think we
| should start encoding our news messages in UTF-8.

using UTF-8 isn't such a bad idea, but it requries identification of the
character set and the encoding for both communication partners to know
what to do, and when we have to do that, anyway, there isn't much more to
this than to identify the character set in the first place. I should've
done that, and once I have time to switch context back to Emacs Lisp,
I'll fix it.

#:Erik

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