Re: Bug#4329: Emacs has hardcoded path for jka-compr, breaks at upgrad
osiris@cs.utexas.edu (Rob Browning) wrote on 02.09.96 in <[🔎] 87iv9x4b71.fsf@raven.ots.utexas.edu>:
> Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi> writes:
> > 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.
Except that that's not true. yyyy-mm-dd is the thing that will sort ok.
> > 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.
I suspect that a significant percentage of people who are used to middle
endian will use it even in the 1996-09-02 version.
As long as none of these is here to get offended, I'll say that this
proves that the combination of stupid formats with stupid people is
harmful.
Also, I'll suggest that 01Jan02 *will* be gotten wrong by some people. Use
4 digit years, Lars.
(Oh, one minor point. 4 digit years actually buy a lot more than 8000
years iff there are delimiters around the number. Both 123456-12-31 and
31Dec123456 are perfectly parsable, should you ever need them, and also
very obvious extensions.)
MfG Kai
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