I've been staying out of this conversation; sometimes I fail to read carefully, but this time I actually understood the question, so I kept my mouth shut, not knowing the answer.
...Except for the obvious possibility, of course. But no one seems to have mentioned that possibility yet, except Mr Relson. So I'll go ahead and say it: If what you want is to plug in a time-zone name, and the local computer doesn't offer it, don't you just have to create a table of 24 possibilities (or maybe a few more) and select one based on the offset from GMT? You can double the size of the table, if you want, by accounting for DST. So if the local time is five hours less than GMT, you cite it either as EST or CDT, depending on the date. Sure, your algorithm presumably can't know whether it's located in Montreal, Costa Rica or Quito, but you can plug ~something~ in and it'll at least match ~a~ time zone. Not as satisfying as having The Real Local time-zone name, I agree. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* There's a new study out that says too much caffeine can cause hallucinations. I think it's true because I was at Starbuck's today, and I hallucinated that a cup of coffee cost $4. -Craig Ferguson */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Charles Mills Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2020 18:24 Or as I said in the OP "and yes, I know the limitations thereof, and that they are not necessarily unique, etc., etc." <g> I think I have run into EST being both Eastern Standard and European Summer Time. It is obviously a funky system, as so many "legacy" (in the generic sense of the word, not in the sense of "mainframe") systems are. +/-nnn makes so much more sense. Frankly, if programmers ruled the world, there probably would not be any local times at all. Certainly no summer times. I would not have been processing the 'XXX' in any event, so I would not have cared about trying to interpret it. It could be literally XXX for all I cared. The e-mail header apparently wanted it and so I was going to put it in there. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2020 2:03 PM Beware of ambiguity. AST is both Arabia Standard Time and Atlantic Standard Time, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zone_abbreviations ... and I hadn't gotten through the "A"s yet. --- On Sun, 17 May 2020 13:39:18 -0700, Charles Mills wrote: >Please read the subject line ... :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
