ISO 8601 assumption

Antoine Leca Antoine.Leca at renault.fr
Fri Oct 6 14:56:43 UTC 2000


Jesper Nørgaard wrote:
> 
> I even disagree about the assumption that yyyy-mm-dd is unambigous [...]
> 
> I have always liked another standard, the yyyy-mmm-dd standard, [...]

In French, June 6th in year 1944 was 1944-JUI-06, and July 6th was 1944-JUI-06...
See the problem? (I even remember of a past version of a well-known spreadsheet
program that stumbles on this one).
Of course, these are in real use, so we have some systems to disambiguate:
using four letters (but then May "mai" is a problem), or using "JUN" for "juin"
and "JUL" for "juillet"), but this is a problem anyway.

If you think on agreeing upon English is a solution, what about:
- Russians (and a lot of other people) that needs to change the keyboard encoding
to type a date in the middle of a run of Cyrillic text...
- the non-English natives where the name of the months are *really* different ;
- the non-English people that are *not* English enable.


> That humanity has still not come up with a completely unambigous date format
> which is generally accepted, really shows how much IT is still in it's infancy.

Have a look toward the discussions of the next format for time expression (the one
that will survive to 2038): it will show you that, indeed, things are still to evolve.


Antoine



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