The US Weather Bureau has used the yyyymmdd format since the 1800s in its
archives.
Stan Doore
----- Original Message -----
From: Pat Naughtin
To: U.S. Metric Association
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 10:23 PM
Subject: [USMA:43662] Re: 24 hour time
On 2009/03/11, at 6:32 AM, John M. Steele wrote:
ISO 8601 is a numeric data interchange format. However, it uses limited
non-numeric characters as data markers, and attempts to preserve human
readability, but is mostly designed for reliable computer parsing.
It does not concern itself with expanding month number into a name, or
indeed any "word" representation of the data. However, I think you can
logically read 1776-07-04 as "seventeen seventy six, July the fourth," (or omit
"the") with the commas representing pauses. This is probably a preferable way
to learn a historical timeline.
Dear John,
It's also a great way to sort dates when you are writing a chronology or a
timeline. See http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/MetricationTimeline.pdf
for the way that I do this.
There are some issues with dates Before the Christian Era (BCE) but generally
you can use the 'sort' command to arrange dates in year order, then month
order, before day order. This becomes more important when events become crowded
such as events relevant to metrication in the 1790s (search for ^p1790 — the ^p
finds the paragraph mark before the 1790 otherwise you find all the cross
references).
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped
thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern metric
system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save thousands each
year when buying, processing, or selling for their businesses. Pat provides
services and resources for many different trades, crafts, and professions for
commercial, industrial and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and
in the USA. Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA,
NIST, and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See
http://www.metricationmatters.com for more metrication information, contact Pat
at [email protected] or to get the free 'Metrication matters'
newsletter go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe.
