Current date and time

[Dag Sunde]

Hear, hear!

I fully support that one...

ISO8601 is the _only_ sensible format to use when developing
new appligations:

    1. It is accepted by more and more national standardization orgs.
    2. It is very easy for human readers to "parse"
    3. It is 100% unambigious.
    4. It is a _lot_ easier to parse and handle in code
    5. _All_ major DB's accept an ISO date and/or time without
       any need for reformatting.

IMNSHO...

Dag Sunde


"François Pinard" <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote in message
news:oq4s6n89po.fsf at titan.progiciels-bpi.ca...
> [William Park]
>
> > >>> import time
> > >>> time.ctime(time.time())
> > 'Tue Jun 20 01:02:03 2000'
>
> Let me advocate (or rather, let Markus Kuhn) for ISO 8601.  I always
found a
> bit miserable that, by default, dates are not international.  Let me
see...
> Yes, this was sent on 2000-02-24:
>
>
> From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn at cl.cam.ac.uk>
> Subject: [tar 1.13.17] Problems with USE_OLD_CTIME
> To: ro at TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE, bug-tar at gnu.org
> Cc: pinard at IRO.UMontreal.CA, karl at cs.umb.edu
>
>
> Rainer Orth <ro at TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE> write 2000-02-03:
> >
> >    I've never understood why GNU tar changed to use the ISO time
> >    format instead of the traditional ctime-based format.
>
> The two arguments brought forwards at the time that I remember were:
>
>   - ISO 8601 is considered to be acceptable in practically all
Gregorian
>     locales, while the old format isn't, as it contains English words.
A
>     locale-dependent output format would make its automatic post
processing
>     horribly difficult, which is why locale-dependent date formatting
>     should be considered with caution.
>
>   - The all-numeric bigendian nature of ISO 8601 actually makes
>     comparing dates in columns by humans significantly faster and
>     easier, so we considered ISO 8601 not only more practical for
>     i18n purposes, but also more user-friendly for English users.
>     (Experiment: try to find the oldest and newest date/time in a
>     printed 100-entry column of dates/times both when written
>     in ISO 8601 and in the old ctime format.)
>
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
>
> Markus
>
> --
> François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard
>
>
>