My machine is Linux michaeln-desktop 2.6.31-22-generic #60-Ubuntu SMP Thu May 27 00:22:23 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
Consider:
print (Time.toString (Date.localOffset()) ^ "\n")
poly (5.3) gives:
~36000.000 (-10 hours)
Moscow ML (2.01) gives:
50400.000 (+14 hours)
mlton (20070826) gives:
50400.000
sml/nj (v110.69) gives
~36000.000
Local time (Australian east coast in cold, cold winter) is 10 hours ahead of UTC.
The Basis says:
The offset from UTC for the local time zone.
(Moscow ML's behaviour is consistent with its own documentation, but it doesn't pretend to implement Basis 2002.)
It seems to me that the answer should actually be +10 hours, because that is what you add to UTC to get *from* UTC to my local time.
Note that the Basis documentation for interpreting the offset field in the record passed to the Date.date function is a whole other story.
(I don't know who/what to write to for SML/NJ.)
Michael.