On 2009/03/11, at 6:32 AM, John M. Steele wrote:
ISO 8601 is a numeric data interchange format. However, it uses
limited non-numeric characters as data markers, and attempts to
preserve human readability, but is mostly designed for reliable
computer parsing.
It does not concern itself with expanding month number into a name,
or indeed any "word" representation of the data. However, I think
you can logically read 1776-07-04 as "seventeen seventy six, July
the fourth," (or omit "the") with the commas representing pauses.
This is probably a preferable way to learn a historical timeline.
Dear John,
It's also a great way to sort dates when you are writing a chronology
or a timeline. See http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/MetricationTimeline.pdf
for the way that I do this.
There are some issues with dates Before the Christian Era (BCE) but
generally you can use the 'sort' command to arrange dates in year
order, then month order, before day order. This becomes more important
when events become crowded such as events relevant to metrication in
the 1790s (search for ^p1790 — the ^p finds the paragraph mark before
the 1790 otherwise you find all the cross references).
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the
modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they
now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for
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Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST,
and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com
for more metrication information, contact Pat at pat.naugh...@metricationmatters.com
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