Implement C's Switch in Python 3

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 10:53 AM Avi Gross <avigross at verizon.net> wrote:
> It is very bad form to have ambiguous compressed formats. Even if you include a slash or minus sign or period or the delimiter of your choice, I sometimes see this:
>
> 01/02/2020
>
> And I wonder if it is meant to be January 2nd or February 1st.
>
> Clearly 30/01/2020 cannot be the 30th month so it must be an alternate format. And, years from now, we may get a year that might confuse us more if compressed like:

The only sane way is to have the components in some sort of reasonable
order. Day-Month-Year is better than Month-Day-Year, though
Year-Month-Day is better than both.

> 21121221
>
> Is that 2112 as the year an Dec 21?

Sure it is. What else would it be? Without delimiters, the only
recognized format is year-month-day.

> In the interest of clarity,  how is this different than including a time zone alongside a time value? Maybe '0Q" is silly, but a prefix or suffix or even a new delimiter might be a good idea. Are any available?
>

Attach a "Z" at the very end (after the time, which you'll probably
have if you care about timezones). ISO 8601 format.

If you need to attach some *other* time zone (which should be rare -
ONLY do this if you absolutely cannot translate to UTC), write the
date and time, then add a space, and the IANA tzdata in the
"Region/City" format eg "Australia/Melbourne" or "America/New_York".
Avoid the abbreviations like "EST" as they are ambiguous (horrifically
so in the cases of "CST" and "BST").

ChrisA