At 04:46 PM 05/06/2000 +1000, Peter Moulder wrote:
la'e <pycyn@aol.com> cusku di'e > RECORD: date/time > Lojban, with practical ellipses in mind, rather than consistent order in a > larger-smaller dimension, records dates in DDMMYYYY order. > NOT ISO FWIW, I believe YYYYMMDD is an alternative ISO form. Compared to DDMMYYYY, it has advantages of monotonic increasing relationship between date and number interpretations (i.e. sortable), and I suspect is less likely to be misinterpreted by Americans than DDMMYYYY.
This is beside the point. If some ask you what the date is tomorrow, you will likely say "the 7th", not "year 2000, month May/5, day 7", and we often abbreviate years to do digits. In real language we ellipsize the information that is unimportant or common knowledge, and the most frequently discussed dates are those of the present time, wherein the year and month are obvious because they haven't changed since the last time you asked. The ISO order presumes no ellipsis, which is no problem since computers hardly care if they send an extra few bytes in every date.
lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)