"prior to"
Markus Kuhn
Markus.Kuhn at cl.cam.ac.uk
Wed Jan 14 11:13:49 UTC 1998
Ken Pizzini wrote on 1998-01-13 11:54 UTC:
> There is a shade of meaning difference between the two: in
> non-technical situations the term "before" can be used to
> mean "up to and including", whereas "prior to" never seems
> to accrete the "including" meaning.
There was in the first draft of ISO 8601:1998 an annex C that tried
to standardize the precise technical meaning of such terms. However
it seems that this annex has been removed from the current second draft
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/8601v03.pdf>.
The terms (as originally proposed in some CEN Medical Informatics working
group proposal) were:
Reference time interval: ---------------->
AT ---------------->
BEFORE ------->
AFTER ------->
DURING ----->
INCLUDES ---------------------------------------->
CO-CONTINUES --------------------------->
CO-PRECEDES ----------------------------->
CO-STARTS ---------->
CO-ENDS ----------->
(Make sure you use a monospaced font to display the above!)
It seems that this CEN proposal is somewhat restricted and incomplete,
but the discussion here suggests that it might nevertheless be a good
idea to have such a specification for technical discussion about temporal
structures. Better proposals?
BTW: The above proposal contradicts your interpretation of "before".
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org, home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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