Re: date formats

[Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu>]

> Yes, I knew there was a "standard" but it doesn't seem to be widely
> implemented.

??

> > > The international standard date notation is
> > >    YYYY-MM-DD
> But a lot of people will be confused by this.  If the doc is is
> English, why not use the existing date format?

Because "English notation" does not exist. The US and European
conventions are completely ambiguous for half of each month. Just
because the US has a convention that you understand and are comfortable
with doesn't mean that it is understandable to other folks.

> need to automate listing docs by date.  But the present notation can
> be easily sorted by year.  Is listing by date really important?  A new
> doc may be in worse shape than a well written old one (where the info
> in the doc is still valid).  So I still think that we should make it
> easy on people and keep the existing date format.
> > > For example, the fourth day of February in the year 1995 is
> > > written in the standard notation as
> > >    1995-02-04
> Some might think this is April 2.

A few might, but they would be those who completely escaped the Y2K dust
up and who may have trouble with other daily functions. Really, the
ISO-8601 convention *is* a worldwide standard, and is the only date
convention which is readily and correctly interpreted in all regions of
the world. English-speaking does not guarantee familiarity with the
arcane conventions of the US colonies ;)

As an example, PostgreSQL supports at least four different date/time
conventions (US, European, ISO, and German). We switched the default
date style to be ISO-8601 for the last release and will not consider
switching back to the older ambiguous convention.

Regards.

                       - Thomas


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