[Datetime-SIG] Clearing up terminology

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 8:34 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
>> $ TZ=Australia/Melbourne date +"%c%z"
>> Thu 30 Jul 2015 10:21:18 AM EST+1000
>>
>> what is (a) Australia/Melbourne, (b) EST?
>
>
> Ah yes, great fun -- what the heck do you call them?
>
> I would say "Australia/Melbourne" is a TimeZone.
>
> EST is a offset -- "Eastern Standard Time" -- i.e. an offset of 5 hours from
> UTC, and "Standard Time", so does not change with DST rules, so not a full
> TimeZone.

Fair enough: "EST is a offset", what is +1000 then?

Let's not keep the suspense.  I ran the date command above on a Linux machine.
On a Mac similar command makes more sense:

$ TZ=Australia/Melbourne date +"%c %Z%z"
Thu Jul 30 10:46:45 2015 AEST+1000

The point, however is that "EST" does not mean -0500 for everyone.