Rob Browning: > Why in the world wouldn't you want to require 4 digits for the date? Because of all the usual bad reasons, and one good one: it doesn't matter. The LSM dates are always past tense, and making the new requirement is trivial, all of thirty seconds of coding. Converting all old dates (once they've been checked) is also trivial. Ambiguity is the problem with LSM, not Y2K. > > 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. yyy-mm-dd will sort properly, but yyyy-dd-mm will not. > As long as you disallow middle endian, the four digit year makes > little or big endian unambiguous. Only if you assume people don't make errors. If I tell you that I wrote something 1996-10-09, you must either assume I _really_ meant 1996-09-10, or that I am a liar. With 10SEP96 (or 10SEP1996) there is no problem. That's the problem, isn't it? People do make mistakes, and the date format might as well guard against it, if the checking can't be done at the input stage. -- Please read <http://www.iki.fi/liw/mail-to-lasu.html> before mailing me. Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.
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