Brian Barker wrote:
At 10:54 14/11/2008 -0500, Dale Robertson wrote:
The most sensible format for today in numeric form is 2008/11/14 (ISO ...
Just in the interests of accuracy, ISO 8601 requires that the separators
- if they are used - be hyphens: 2008-11-14. This is one of the formats
provided by OpenOffice, of course - though not the default in many
(most?) locales.
Locales are partly bogus. The basic idea is that there are standards
used within particular areas, usually countries, by about 99% of the
people. But it's not true. In fact, people often vary widely within
countries and even within individual communities.
Canada is mostly metric, but paper measurements are mostly in inches.
Canadian dictionaries generally represent both US-specific spellings and
Oxford UK-specific spellings as both correct. Sometimes, however they
reject a particular US spelling or a particular UK spelling.
Date formats are up to you. I generally use ISO formats, with hyphens,
as the most readable and as a format that will sort properly when in
text format, as when part of a file name. And I know it won't be
misinterpreted by the reader, as the four-digit year number indicates
the order.
But because locale formats demand a single value, the experts have to
select one usage, usually following some federal government standard.
(Even federal government standards are not in agreement on every issue.)
About all you can get from the values in a locale is that the default
values set in that locate are at least acceptable in the area that the
locale purports to cover. In some places that date formatting may be
used by 99% of the people. In others, it may be 51% or even less.
Even within the US, there are companies that have gone metric
internally, regardless of what the locale says.
Jim Allan
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