🚀 go-pugleaf

In <3761@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au> gordoni@berlioz.ua.oz (Gordon Irlam) writes:

>From article <859@spam.ua.oz>, by ross@spam.ua.oz.au (Ross Williams)

>  [A meta standard for data compression.]

>> Date string - A  date string is a standard string  of length 11 having
>>     the format "dd-mmm-yyyy" where dd  is in the range "01".."31", mmm
>>     is in the range "Jan","Feb",.."Dec"  (Case dependent), and yyyy is
>>     in the range "1900" and "9999".

>Hence,

>    20-Jun-1991

>But this creates yet another incompatible date/time format.  It would
>be better to adopt a standard date/time format.

>A fairly common date/time format on the Internet is that used in
>RFC 822.  It looks something like this.

>    20 Jun 91 15:48:18 GMT

>Unfortunately this date/time format has several disadvantages:

>    - It contains "white space" characters.

>    - Even without the white space the mapping from literal strings to
>      date/times is many to 1.

>    - The representation of the month only makes sense in English
>      speaking countries.

>    - It doesn't include the century.  (What will happen to Usenet on
>      the 1st of January 2000?)

>It would probably be better to choose one of the following.

>    1991-06-20

>    1991-06-20T15:48:18Z

>These are the "extended format complete representation of a calendar
>date", and the "extended format complete representation of a moment of
>Coordinated Universal Time" as specified by ISO 8601.

I have a better idea.  Instead of storing a date STRING, why not just
store a number?  The Macintosh stores dates as a 4 byte number,
representing the seconds elapsed since Jan 1, 1904.  Unix has a similar
convention, only from 1972 (better, IMHO).  Then it should be up to the
user program to represent the date.   The Mac has IUDateString, unix and
others have ctime(), etc.

--tom shores

PS: considering the nature of this group, shouldn't it be called
    "comp.ression" :-)


   Tom... Tommy... Thomas... the Tom-ster, the Tom-boy, the Tomminator...
   ... Tom Shores, Department of Mathematics, University of Nebraska.
   ... shores@fergvax.unl.edu