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re. date format



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At 04:43 PM 11/24/97 +0200, Michael Richardson wrote:
>
>>>>>> "Camillo" == Camillo Sdrs <Camillo.Sars@DataFellows.com> writes:
>    Camillo> The ISO date format "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss" is valid for
>    Camillo> another 9000 years.  I'd say that is a fairly good
>    Camillo> minimum age for dates&times.  It also happens to be valid
>    Camillo> for dates several hundreds of years back.  And it has the
>    Camillo> nice property of sorting correctly under ASCII "<", "="
>    Camillo> and ">".
>
>  And, if you don't want to use the ascii form, (and sort it ASCII as
>you point out), then you can just make it a "bitstream" of seconds
>since either 1970, or since 1752 (switch to Gregorian), or something
>celestrial. Days since 1900 is used in astronomy.

I intentionally left it as ASCII in human format, not seconds since any 
time, since I see no use at all for computing the interval between two 
times.  Seconds since XXXX makes that interval computation easy, but all we 
need is <, =, >.  In fact, all we need is < and >, since = is only 
infinitessimally probable.

 - Carl

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