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Subject: Re: half-hour time zones
From: Dan Allen (danallen@XXX.XXX)
Date: Fri Nov 02 2001 - 23:18:25 EST
Nepal was 5 hours and 30 minutes ahead of GMT until 1986,
and then they decided to get really weird and Nepal is now
5 hours and 45 minutes ahead of GMT!
Some of the Unix timezone files have some interesting history
about these things.
Dan Allen
-----Original Message-----
From: Navigation Mailing List
[mailto:NAVIGATION-L@XXX.XXX]On Behalf Of Paul Hirose
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 6:45 PM
To: NAVIGATION-L@XXX.XXX
Subject: half-hour time zones
Anyone know why some places have time offsets not an integral number
of hours from Greenwich? Like Newfoundland. According to my atlas (a
few years old), standard time there is some hours and 30 minutes
behind Greenwich.
I don't see any advantage to such an odd time zone, and several
disadvantages. For example, I've heard that some GPS receivers won't
allow fractional hour offsets for the local time display. And my
watch, which has a secondary time zone, is the same way.
Years ago I wrote a program which had to know the local time offset
from Greenwich, and it accepted any offset, down to decimal seconds if
you wanted. No arbitrary limitations for me! But I can sympathize with
programmers who decline to cater to (or are ignorant of) weird time
zones.
I'd like to hear how Newfoundland got that time zone.
--paulhirose@XXX.XXX (Paul Hirose)
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