Subject: Sane and Rational date format (was: (from lojban-beginners) pi'e

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 18:16:02 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, James F. Carter wrote:

> > 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.

It is a compatible standard, and it is simple to understand without weird
internal reversals of endianism, following a single rule. These arguments
seem to override invocations of tradition. detri4 can be filled to clue in
the readers that cuvjdikapoi is being used.

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A Nationalist is a Globalist who's city has been bombed.