Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
I thought the day-month-year was the most logical, increasing in size
from left to right. I agree the American way is silly.
Hmmm, obviously, you never have to compute the difference of two dates,
or add a certain amount of time to a date.
Trust me - I have been working in meteorology now for over 18 years: The
most efficient representation of dates is YYYYMMDDHHmmss (4 digit years
followed by a 2 digit month, followed by a 2 digit day-in-the-month,
followed by a 2 digit hour-in-the-day, followed by a 2 digit
minute-of-the hour, followed by a 2 digit second-of-the-minute.
It sorts lexicographically in the right way, too.
Oh, and for the Y2K skeptics: Yes, we wrote this as YYMMDDHHmmss prior
to the 1999-2000 new year and yes, it would have had enormous
consequences if we didn't fix it in time (which we did, almost - I made
the mistake of allowing the IT department to update the operating system
of our operational machine before the 29th of February 2000 - that
provoked a lot of havoc, because it was not really an update - it was
just a security fix to an older version of the OS).
Needless to say, I was unreachable for this "challenge" - I was in Las
Vegas for a Fortran Standardization Committee meeting ;-)
--
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@xxxxxxxxx - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html
