Re: date formats

[David Merrill <dmerrill@lupercalia.net>]

On Fri, Dec 08, 2000 at 10:24:10AM -0600, Craig M. Buchek wrote:
> 
> 
> Stein Gjoen wrote:
> > David Merrill wrote:
> > > AFAIK, nobody uses YYYY-MM-DD. The ambiguous dates are those where the
> > > year falls last (US usage is MM-DD-YYYY while English (and others) is
> > > DD-MM-YYYY).
> > Trivia: In Japan they use YYYY-MM-DD, often with kanji for year, month
> > and day. Inother countries people use "/" rather than "-" to separate
> > the fields. Al in all it is a complete mess.
> 
> Actually, I think he meant that YYYY-MM-DD won't confuse anyone, because
> nobody uses YYYY-DD-MM.  The separator shouldn't confuse anybody either -- I
> personally prefer a period.  Think about someone looking at 2000/10/12.  Is
> it October 12 or December 10?  Us dumb Americans will assume that it is in
> MM-DD format, just like we are used to.  October 12.  Everyone else will be
> smart enough to figure out that since it starts with the year, the next
> field will be the month, because why would you put the day next to the year?
> October 12.  So there is no mess with YYYY-MM-DD.

Ummmm...  Yes. This must be my week for ID10T-BKAC errors :-o.

> Another nice thing about YYYY-MM-DD format is that it is sortable with
> normal ASCII sorting.  No parsing required.

Yes, Good point. I find that when coding it is the easiest format to
work with in lots of ways.

-- 
Dr. David C. Merrill                     http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                dmerrill@lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org
                                       Finger me for my public key

Juall's Law on Nice Guys:
	Nice guys don't always finish last; sometimes they don't finish.
	Sometimes they don't even get a chance to start!


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