Subject: Re: [lojban] Lojban / Most translated Web Page

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 May 2000 16:30:30 -0400

At 04:46 PM 05/06/2000 +1000, Peter Moulder wrote:
>la'e <[email-masked]> 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 [email-masked]
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!)