A contributor to the Maxima project bumped into this while trying Maxima + ABCL 1.4.0. CL-USER(1): (ENCODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME 48 1 15 15 8 1995 -23) 3017516508 CL-USER(2): (ENCODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME 48 1 15 15 8 1995 -13) 3017516508 CL-USER(3): (ENCODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME 48 1 15 15 8 1995 13) 3017516508 CL-USER(4): (ENCODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME 48 1 15 15 8 1995 23) 3017516508 CL-USER(5): (ENCODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME 48 1 15 15 8 1995 'foo) 3017516508 Not too surprising, I think -- a glance at ./src/org/armedbear/lisp/time.lisp shows that the TIME-ZONE argument doesn't take part in the calculations. TIME-ZONE does come into play in pre-14840 versions of time.lisp and the results are consistent with other CL implementations, at least for the examples exercised by the Maxima test suite (date parsing). Tried to submit a bug report via Trac but when I clicked on the OpenID button I get a connection reset error. Thanks for all your efforts, I appreciate it. Robert Dodier