From: Dominikus Scherkl (lyratelle@gmx.de)
Date: Fri Dec 09 2005 - 02:00:30 CST
Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> The reason for short formats like 08/12/05 in this context is
> not human laziness (the father of all inventions), since this
> is not about data that people are expected to type. This is
> about data they are expected to read.
> Superficially, eight characters vs. ten characters is not a
> big issue, but it becomes an issue if you have an array with
> a dozen columns containing dates.
But especially in this case, ambiguity is worst.
In a table where you find
08/12/05
04/03/02
07/08/06
...
it becomes considerably hard to read if you ever encountered
different order of year, month and day. If you need to compare
many dates, you always get confused and need to rely on the
(few?) lines with unambigous dates like 30/12/99.
with only a single date you have time to think over it an so
can resove the ambiguity - but in this case two chars more
doesn`t matter.
Best Regards,
-- Dominikus Scherkl XPaneon Technologies dscherkl@xpaneon.de Tel. 06023/9436-42
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Dec 09 2005 - 05:03:05 CST