"Simon Marlow"
This is the nub of the problem: the proposal does provide such functionality, but it isn't implementable on Unix systems.
..but it is, for times where leap second information is available (and where the underlying behavior is known)?
I think you're assuming that the timezone TLAs don't represent fixed offsets relative to UTC. I assume that they do.
Yes. I've tried to check, but I don't find any handy references by superflous googling.
For example, here we are in timezone GMT at the moment (== UTC+0000), but we switch to BST in the summer (UTC+0100).
It appears you're right: sefirot% date Thu Nov 13 11:39:19 CET 2003 sefirot% date 07011000 date: cannot set date: Operation not permitted Tue Jul 1 10:00:00 CEST 2003
I just looked up the list of timezone abbreviations, and it's pretty short. The library could easily include this list.
data Timezone = UTC | GMT | PDT ... deriving ... data TZOffset = -- abstract (or just an Int)
Not sure what this would buy us.
Reversibility? I was assuming that there was, perhaps, a one-to-many relationship between names and offsets. Apparently this is wrong, and the three/four-letter abbreviations are just a more complex way to say Alpha, Bravo ... Zulu time (or +0100, -0100, +0200...).
Yes, but don't confuse geographical locations with timezones.
Okay. It seems I was mistaken about this. -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants