In reply to footpad, he might want to look at ISO8601 an overview of which is here. The supposed standard date/time rules. (ha!) (Actually I found something interesting that im going to use at work. EU rule EN 28601 specifies that dates in all EU countries should be represented as YYYY-MM-DD not the DD.MM.YY they love in Germany, and not the DD/MM/YY they love in the UK, certainly NOT the dumb US standard MM-DD-YY. Cool.)

Maclir, I dont know why you're apologising. Time is pretty interesting once you've had to program it, or if you are interested in watches. The reason GMT won over the PMT (Paris Meridian Time, obviusely 'not' what the French called it) was that the British government funded the production of better maps than the French at the time when precision navigation was being opened up by the invention of the Naval Chronometer (a British Invention). Apparently it was not unheard of to have French Warships with translated or even untranslated copies of British maps on board.

As the British made the best maps, with all measurements based on GMT, they became the standard and so did GMT. When there finally was an international congress on the matter, (along with time zones), a number of neutral meridians were proposed but eventually it was decided more financially expedient to formalize the defacto standard, ie GMT. (No need to replace the bulk of the existstant maps.)

UPDATE
Added link to ISO8061 page and a little commentary on dates in EU.
Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)