Current date and time

[François Pinard]

[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