Comment below:

Patrick Nagel wrote:
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> Hi Temlakos,
>
> On Monday 27 July 2009 23:45:44 Temlakos wrote:
>   
>> 1.   Internationalize the twelve-hour clock conventions. I should
>> mention in this connection that twelve-hour times are present in written
>> documents only in America, Latin America (including Brazil), Korea,
>> Russia, and China. Everywhere else uses 24-hour conventions in writing.
>> For that reason, I do not propose to support this in German, French,
>> Italian, or Polish. I do plan to support it in English, Spanish (for
>> Latin-American usage), Korean, Russian, and Chinese.
>>     
>
> Just a short comment: I have nearly never seen a written time with a.m./p.m. 
> in (mainland) China. I have seen 上午/下午 (prefixed, like 上午9:40), but I would 
> say 99% of the time they use the 24 hour clock in writing. Have a look at 
> [1], it's quite complete and accurate, from what I can tell.
>
> Patrick.
>
> [1]: 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_by_country#Greater_China
>
>   

Yes, your reference [1] above happens to be my source for the 
internationalization of the twelve-hour clock conventions. And in fact, 
those are the characters that I chose to internationalize it /with/. And 
I am pleased to observe that the excellent parsing system in 
SMW_DV_Time.php allows full support of either a prefixed or a suffixed 
twelve-hour annotation.

I'm glad you noticed that 99% of all written documents in Chinese use 
the 24-hour convention. Happily, the support for the 上午/下午 
characters is very simple to add. This will appear in 
SMW_LanguageZh_cn.php and SMW_LanguageZh_tw.php and takes only two 
lines, one for the array of identifiers and one for the special regular 
expression that I composed for browsing.

To find the internationalization for AD/BC and (B)CE I had to look up 
the articles "Anno_Domini" and "Common_Era" and follow the links to the 
versions of those articles on other languages.

A few more comments:

1.   As I might have mentioned before, I've decided that my support of 
am/pm should be case-sensitive. In English, the minuscule (lowercase) 
"am" means "ante meridiem," while the majuscule (uppercase) AM means 
"Anno Mundi." Because the browsing system makes no attempt to account 
for symbol order in an annotated date, I need to treat those two symbols 
as distinct.

2.   Presently I plan to support twelve-hour-clock and calendar symbols 
without whitespace or punctuation, other than the hyphen (-). Hence the 
appropriate symbols in French for AD, BC, CE, and BCE are apJ-C, avJ-C, 
EC, and AEC, and those in German are AD, AC, vuZ, and vdZ. If anyone can 
figure out how to support the non-breaking space ( ) as either a 
separator or as part of a symbol, I'd appreciate it.

3.   I was gratified to see the existing support for time-zone offsets. 
But: can anyone help out with international symbols for time zones? Or 
are those symbols standard across all languages? I suspect that they 
might be--for example, EST for Eastern Standard Time (-5:00), EDT for 
Eastern Daylight-saving Time (-4:00), MSK for Moscow Standard Time 
(+3:00), and MSD for Moscow /Summer/ Time (+4:00). In that case, I 
should be able to support those, perhaps by adding another regexp-based 
browser.

4.   Similarly, I can add support for US military time-zone indicators, 
e.g. Zulu (0:00), Romeo (-5:00), Quebec (-4:00), Alpha (+1:00), and so 
on. Does anyone know of any military time-zone naming conventions other 
than that used by the United States Armed Services?

Actually, the browsing and parsing system is almost done. Now I need to 
"port" my calendar functions, and try to re-implement my "Tooltip" 
display as ShortWikiText.

Temlakos

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