Simos Xenitellis wrote on 2005-03-04 16:42 UTC: > b. European Standard 28601
Only the final draft version of the most recent ISO version of the same thing can be found on the net, e.g. there's temporarily a copy on: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/ISO-8601:2004.pdf A summary is on http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html EN 28601 is identical (except for a change of font) with an older version of ISO 8601 standard. The differences are minor. > > Exercise: When is 12:00 AM today? > That was about 4 hours and a half ago. You may find, that a slight majority of users of the 12-h notation would disagree. I believe that most C libraries print midnight as 12:00 AM in strftime(), because it will be followed by 12:01 AM (i.e., the AM/PM transition coincides with the 11->12 transition). The underlying problem is that, in the 12-h notation, there is no really clear way to distinguish between 00:00 (midnight at the start of day), 12:00 (noon) and 24:00 (midnight at the end of the day). Even if you used the cumbersome "12 noon" versus "12 midnight" notation often seen in the US, you still can't distinguish between 00:00 and 24:00. With the 24-h notation, however, there is no ambiguity, 24:00 today is the same as 00:00 tomorrow. In addition, it is simpler, compacter (fewer characters), and easier to compare and calculate with, both for humans and computers. It's the way to go, independent of your language or nationality! Markus -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
