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Re: half-hour time zones


Subject: Re: half-hour time zones
From: Dan Allen (danallen@XXX.XXX)
Date: Fri Nov 02 2001 - 23:21:10 EST


The official history from some well-research Unix timezone work has
Nepal being 5:41:16 ahead of GMT until 1920, then 5:30 until 1986,
and now 5:45 ahead, which is closer to their older value.

Timezones didn't come into being until the 1880s.

-----Original Message-----
From: Navigation Mailing List [mailto:NAVIGATION-L@XXX.XXX]On
Behalf Of Trayfors, William
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 6:54 PM
To: NAVIGATION-L@XXX.XXX
Subject: Re: half-hour time zones

Paul:

There are some weird ones. India is on the half-hour (GMT +5:30). Nepal
used to be...maybe still is... 40 minutes off the hour (just to be different
from India) at GMT +5:40 :-))

There may be others.

Bill

At 06:44 PM 11/2/01 -0800, you wrote:
>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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