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

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 14:48:25 -0700 (PDT)

The YY-MM-DD format which the ISO has prescribes is what I've been using
for the past ten years; I was taught it as an engineering student. There's
a lot of it about. The kind of "noone else
is doing it, quasigovernmental whim" stuff pc brings up is (a) bogus
(though characteristically libertarian :-) ), and
(b) the reason why the metric system will never happen in the States.
It's nonsense, but it's you guys' loss.

The Lojban-internal reasons adduced are also not compelling to me. Noone's
going to confuse dates with trailing sumti; it'd be quite OK not to have
them behave the same. After all, Linnaean taxonomy is not going to work
like that in Lojban either: you'll still be naming Genus and Species, and
omitting every taxon above it.

That said, I am committed to the baseline (yes, I'm avoiding using the
word I'd normally use for now), which means my Lojban web page is my only
page that *doesn't* have YY-MM-DD. But, reason being reason, I see no
cause not to allow YY-MM-DD in Lojban text if explicitly signalled. Date
ordering is not hardcoded into the grammar, after all.

As long as noone defends MM-DD-YY -- or even *considers* using it in
Lojban -- I'm not too fussed.

(After all, if it wasn't for the braindamage of MM-DD-YY, do you think the
ISO would have even bothered mandating YY-MM-DD? It's the only reason
there's any ambiguity to dates at all.)

Nick, who's still getting caught out by MM-DD-YY after living in the
States for 2.5 years.

-- 
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Nick Nicholas, Breathing I REJECT {gumri}
[email-masked] (Lojban Wiki, Resurrected Gismu)