From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: imp@bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2018 10:20:26 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] OT: American Culture In-Reply-To: References: <1515019775.7311.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <20180104025959.GA34418@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 9:48 AM, Tony Finch wrote: > Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > > > A thing that nobody has mentioned, and for which I can't find a > > reference easily: didn't System V have time zone offsets the wrong way > > round? I have some recollection from about 1988. > > It's enshrined in POSIX but I believe it goes back earlier than that. > http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/tzset.html > > As I understand it, POSIX TZ offsets are the wrong way round because it > was more convenient to omit the sign on the TZ offsets, and because Unix > comes from America that meant no sign -> west, negative -> east. > There's also a time interval measurement convention from the high precision time keeping world that has negative offsets 'forwards' and positive offsets 'backwards' which this matches. It sure was confusing to me when I first encountered it when the time scientists were telling me the measurements were backwards... Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: