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

From: "James F. Carter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 09:45:19 -0700 (PDT)

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
UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555
Email: [email-masked] http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)