Re: [lojban] Lojban / Most translated Web Page

[Jim Carter <jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU>]

About dates, ISO 8601 does contemplate ellipsis.  Here are my notes on
ISO 8601 from one of my Y2K upgrade projects, as of about 1999-06:

#   ISO 8601 specifies the format for numeric dates and times. The standard 
#       does not cover alphabetic dates, which are language-specific.
#       References:
#       http://www.iso.ch/markete/8601.pdf              The standard itself
#       http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.ht      A good summary
#   The complete format is ccyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.ffff, where the parts are
#       century, year, month (in 01..12), day (in 01..31), hour (in 00..23,
#       or 24 in special cases), minute (00..59), second (00..59, or 60 on
#       leap seconds), and decimal fractional seconds.  Example:
#       1999-06-09 13:37:32 +0700 (see below for timezone).
#   Possible variants are:
#       Omit parts from the left or right (century, year, seconds, minutes).
#       Omit the entire date, or the entire time.
#       Omit the hyphens and colons.
#       Join the date and time by upper case T rather than blank.
#   Other punctuation such as / or . is not allowed.  
#   For a week-based code use ccyy-Www-d where the parts are century, year,
#       week (in 01..53), day (in 1..7, 1 = Monday).  Week 01 is the week that
#       has more days in that year than the previous one, or equivalently for
#       which January 04 is on Sunday or earlier of that week.  Example:
#       1997-W05-2 = Tuesday, 28 January 1997.
#   Same variants as for month-based dates.  The day of week can also be 
#       omitted.
#   The year and day code: ccyy-ddd, where the day is in 001..366.
#   For timezones append +hh or +hhmm or +hh:mm, or the same with minus, or
#       "Z" for UTC.  Example: Afghanistan time is +0430.


James F. Carter        Voice 310 825 2897	FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet;  6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA  90095-1555
Internet: jimc@math.ucla.edu (finger for PGP key)
UUCP:...!{ucsd,ames,ncar,gatech,purdue,rutgers,decvax,uunet}!math.ucla.edu!jimc

On Sat, 6 May 2000, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:

> 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!)
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Avoid the lines and visit avis.com for quick and easy online 
> reservations. Enjoy a compact car nationwide for only $29 a day! 
> Click here for more details.
> http://click.egroups.com/1/3011/3/_/17627/_/957644880/
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com
>