Hi Lennart, Branden, and Guillem, On 4/18/23 19:32, Lennart Jablonka wrote: > Quoth Alejandro Colomar: >>>> What do standards say about formatting dates? >>> >>> Nothing that I know of. >>> >>>> Do they specify the character? >>> >>> Not that I know of. > > ISO 8601:2004 (not the newest revision, but the one I found), the > standard defining the YYYY‐MM‐DD explicitly calls for a “hyphen,” > stating additionally: > >> In an environment where use is made of a character repertoire based on >> ISO/IEC 646, “hyphen” and “minus” are both mapped onto “hyphen-minus”. > > This is not the case here. A hyphen is the character to use; that is, > an unescaped hyphen-minus in the input. Agreed. Let's use hyphen for dates. :) Thanks for checking ISO! [...] >>>> However, date(1) only accepts hyphen-minus, so it would be nice to use >>>> a compatible format, even if standards didn't mandate it. > > The standard mandates a hyphen. A hyphen-minus is to be used where the > date is to be interpreted as a string to be given to \fIdate\fP. [...] >> I'm not convinced, because dates are not prose. Why should we use hyphens >> in dates formatted with standards-like formats? I would agree in using >> hyphens in dates if we spelled out dates unformatted, in plain English. >> But if we use ISO-like or RFC-like formats, I think we should adhere to >> them completely. > > Great! Exactly my opinion. An RFC usually tells you to use ASCII, so > we should do that where applicable. Luckily, we aren’t concerned with > RFCs here, but with ISO 8601. > Guillem, I'll apply your existing patch, and will remove manually the bits about hyphen-minus. You don't need to resend. If you know about places where the man pages use hyphen-minus in dates and would like to send a patch to remove the escape (so to produce a hyphen), I'd appreciate that. Cheers, Alex -- <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/> GPG key fingerprint: A9348594CE31283A826FBDD8D57633D441E25BB5
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