PAT: Please suppress my email address where ever it might appear in the headers. Thanks!
John McHarry
This is true for most "other countries" in the world who use '0' as their domestic long distance access code, that they actually write it "as if" it were a part of the national number, when in reality it isn't, and is to be omitted on calls to that country dialed from outside (overseas). But there are some countries in the world where you MUST dial any leading zero's of their domestic number. Which countries require a leading zero from outside and which countries don't want outside inbound calls to be dialed with a leading '1' has varied over time. And there are "inconsistancies" to be aware of as well.
Prior to their national re-numbering of the later 1990s, the island of Tasmania in Australia (but ONLY that island, not the rest of Australia) had area codes that actually began with a significant initial digit of '0'. Domestically, they were printed as 00X-etc. You had to drop the leading '0' on calls from outside. Other parts of Austrailia had significant first digits other than '0', but they did display their number with the leading '0' access code.
It might be confusing to know whether or not an Australian number being displayed was a number in Tasmania written with only one '0', i.e., the true "significant" part of the domestic number, or if it was some other number in Australia that was displaying the access digit of '0' "as if" it wwre a significant part of the domestic telephone number.
I don't know if this still applies today, but there were some countries in the world who had other domestic access code digits, usually '9' or '8'. And these access code digits might even be displayed as if it were a significant leading digit of the domestic number, when it really is not. I don't know if these countries have since changed their domestic toll access digit to '0', or if they have "reformatted" the display of domestic numbers to "separate" the leading access digit from the rest of the area code and domestic number though. Some countries probably changed over from '9' or '8', to '0', when they went through major domestic re-numbering in the
1995-2000 time period. (During the second half of the 1990s, most of the world was being renumbered or having reformatting of their numbering, especially the US and Canada with scores of new area codes! Today this has slowed down to almost a trickle, in the US/Canada, as well as elsewhere throughout the world).