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Re: re. date format

Carl Ellison wrote:
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 
> 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.

Strictly, all you need is <, coz a > b iff b < a, and a == b iff not (a
< b or b < a).

Shades of STL!

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
Ben Laurie            |Phone: +44 (181) 735 0686|Apache Group member
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