In response to my query Shmuel wrote: | There is a simple way; a raw time value refers to the current day. It | is not, of course, suitable for use in files that must be read on a | different day, but it is perfectly appropriate for use in human | interfaces. You know this.
I do indeed know it. To my wife on the telephone, I may well say, "I'll be back at 10:30" or the like. Such statements are insulated from date and time-zone ambiguity because they are local and ephemeral. I would not write a program that had embedded in it the heroic assumption that a time value was a time value for some current day (bad) and time zone (worse), and I do not really think that Shmuel would do so either. The problem here is that 'human interfaces' are not all of a piece, and Shmuel knows this. My interface with my wife of 51 years admits of telegraphic brevity and much apparent but not in fact substantive ambiguity. Computer-system 'human interfaces', on the other hand, must be explicit and as unambiguous as we can make them. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
