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Re: Bug#4329: Emacs has hardcoded path for jka-compr, breaks at upgrade



Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi> writes:

> The only official LSM date format is ddMMMyy, where dd
> is two digits for day of month, MMM is first the letters of the
> English name of the month, and yy is the last two digits of the
> year (which lets us reach the 2090's).

Why in the world wouldn't you want to require 4 digits for the date?
Storage is not that expensive, and who wants to always have to special
case the weird wrap around at 00?  

Without the special casing, things break in 4 years.  By requiring 2
extra characters, you buy yourself an extra eight thousand years or
so, and if humans are still using any of these systems by then I'd be
surprised (if I weren't dead).

> For reasons unknown, people _will_ write dates in the form
> yyyy-dd-mm. Don't ask me why, but they do. Up to several percent of
> them.

It's because they will sort properly with a standard alphabetical
sort, like that used by "ls", or perl's default "sort", etc.

> Having the month spelled out as text is the only way to make
> dates unambiguous.

As long as you disallow middle endian, the four digit year makes
little or big endian unambiguous.
 
--
Rob



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