joda@pdc.kth.se (Johan Danielsson) writes:

| pinard@iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard) writes:
| 
| > The usual wrong thing with dates is using local American habits in
| > wide distribution contexts (like mail and news) for when programs
| > have *not* been internationalised, or by default.  ISO 8601 would be
| > a good default.
| 
| Yes, but ISO 8601, although intuitive to me, is not very friendly
| to people used to other ways of writing dates, such as americans.

You might have been educated by Americans :-).

There are other cultures in this world than the American one.  The trend
is considering that for international matters, choices should not always
nor necessarily be American by default.

| The usual question with all-numbers date formats, "is 1997-05-03 the
| third of May or the fifth of March", is the same question I always ask
| when I see 05/03/97 (or is it 03/05/97?).

When you write `123', you do not ask yourself if `2' is the number of
hundreds, tens, or units.  Hopefully, many people share this convention
that going left to right goes from more to less significative.
This convention usually goes without saying, and people do not feel
lost or mixed, they do know that `2' counts tens in `123'.  ISO 8601
just adopted this convention "year, month, day", from most to least
significative, exactly like numbers.  Sorting ISO 8601 dates is a simple
and straightfoward matter.  The convention is logical, and easy to
remember, just like for digits in numbers.  Further, in many countries,
really, people find it natural and easy going.  That is why 8601 got
accepted as an international standard.  I agree that American dates are
often confused.  That's yet another reason for not taking these dates
as models.

| The best (IMO) way to write dates that should be understood by an
| international audience is something like 1997-Mar-03, which pretty
| much leaves us with RFC-822.

`Mar' is surely not best, for a month.  Definitely not best.  If you start
with American dates and stop to American dates, you are left with RFC 822,
that's true.  We have to think wider.

-- 
François Pinard                          mailto:pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
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