Time we switched to unicode? (was Explanation of this Python language feature?)

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 4:56 PM, Mark H Harris <harrismh777 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/25/14 12:48 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> Yup. Welcome to timezones. I'm UTC +11 here, although we'll drop back
>> to +10 shortly as DST finishes (yay!). It's currently 0547 UTC, so
>> you're presumably five hours behind UTC, which would put you east
>> coast USA, most likely. (Especially since your mailer is putting the
>> dates as mm/dd/yy, which is an abomination peculiar to Americans.)
>
>
> No, we're already DST; so we're normally UTC -6, now  UTC -5. We're CDST
> Minnesota (Southeast)
>
> Its entirely weird working with people all over the world in seconds 24-7
> 365 (we're on one tiny planet, you know?)

It is one small planet, in many ways, yes. Plus, as well as timezones,
you have different people working different schedules. Some of us are
active in the weird hours of the night, others might be posting from
work (a good bit of python-dev traffic right now involves one of Red
Hat's Python people, so it's entirely possible he's posting during
business hours his time), and others will be active here during their
evenings. Net result: The list never goes quiet!

>> (Especially since your mailer is putting the
>> dates as mm/dd/yy, which is an abomination peculiar to Americans.)
>
>
> I did not know that; so is  25 Mar 2014 the preferred way?

Putting the month in words is unambiguous (at least among users of the
Gregorian calendar or its derivatives). For numeric dates, there are
broadly three competing formats: d/m/y, m/d/y, and y/m/d. (Or using
dots or hyphens between the components, or in the case of y/m/d, no
separator at all - I'll write today's date as 20140325 in some
contexts.) Of them, y/m/d is both the clearest and the least commonly
used; with a four-digit year, there's no way it could be confused for
anything else.

ChrisA