On 01/02/2014 05:06 PM, erik wrote: > Hi Kent, > > Will we live to see a common worldwide date format AND measurement > system?;-) > You were right about the ambiguous dates. I changed it to a more clear > variant and start working on a better metric/imperial handling of my > program. >
Erik: For date-time representation, we have the international standard ISO 8601 (http://www.iso.org/iso/iso8601). I frequently shorten the YYYY-MM-DD representation to YYYYMMDD when I document code. There's any number of important Internet 'standards' which do not observe this standard. A case in point is RFC 2822 which defines the headers of the email we are exchanging. It defines a date as "day month year". This isn't surprising since many early Internet RFCs codified the prevailing practices here in the USA, and it's hard to change the practice once there are millions of mail agent programs in place. Representation of decimal numbers is a mess. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark, for example for a historical perspective, or http://www.swedeteam.com/iso31/ for a contemporary view. When I began working with ISO committees in the 1980s, we were bound by editorial policy (dictated by tough ISO staff members we used to refer to as "the gnomes of Geneva") which required the use of the comma to denote a decimal point when writing standards. Things seem to be changing. I understand that, for example, ISO 6093 "Information processing - Representation of numerical values in character strings for information interchange" allows either the comma or the period/full stop, so, apparently the editorial policy is changing as well. For an interesting view on this outcome from the standpoint of us bumptious Americans, see http://www.nist.gov/director/sco/gsig/decimal_112206.cfm Note that it isn't just the USA but also China, Japan, and India, among others, who raised the ruckus and why. When I was still bright eyed and bushy tailed I thought "how hard can developing these standards be? Everybody benefits." Now I'm nearly 70 and still bear the scars proving these standards are very hard to develop. It's not that they are a bad idea, or even that they are technically difficult; it's that national and pan-national economic competitiveness hangs in the balance, or at least that's what business leaders tell their respective political leaders. So my short answer to you is, no, I don't that believe we, certainly not I, will live to see the common usage you envision. Good luck figuring out how to add localization to your program. Whatever you do, please be explicit in your screens so the user doesn't have to assume anything. You know what they say about "assume". If you don't, search for the Benny Hill sketch. Live long and prosper! Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, & PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
