Re: [lojban] (from lojban-beginners) pi'e

["James F. Carter" <jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU>]

On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Pierre Abbat wrote:

> On Thursday 13 September 2001 00:42, Rob Speer wrote:
> > I think there is an intrinsic reason. Dates go from smaller to larger
> > units, and times go from larger to smaller. Combining them like that gives
> > the bizarre order: hour, minute, [second], day, month, year.
> >...
>
> I think that when dates and times are combined, and they are all numeric, the
> order should be year, month, day, hour, minute, second.

I agree.  ISO 8601 specifies dates in the following variant formats:

    ccyymmdd		19991231
    ccyymmddhhmmss	19991231235959
    ccyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss	1999-12-31 23:59:59
	And trimming any of the time parts from either end, if unambiguous.

And an upper case T may replace the blank if absolutely necessary.  There
are also specifications for day-of-week and day-of-year.

As international relations (of the positive kind) grow and strengthen it is
important that partners be able to interchange data, specifically digital
records containing ISO-8859-x encoded dates.  All cultures are going to
have to give up their idiosyncratic date formats and adopt a common
standard, of which ISO-8601 is the presently obvious one, besides being
totally serviceable in my opinion.

Lojban ought to include itself in the world cultural community, and adopt
the ISO-8601 date order, ignoring baseline issues on the grounds that the
original decision was a mistake brought about because nobody at that time
had thought about the subsequently resolved functional issues.

A lot can happen in 16 years.

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
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Email: jimc@math.ucla.edu    http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)