http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/map-mondays-wtf-is-wrong-with-canada-s-time
and surprisingly missing is diggs notation - DD/MM/YY/EH
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/map-mondays-wtf-is-wrong-with-canada-s-time
and surprisingly missing is diggs notation - DD/MM/YY/EH
It seems that in large parts of Africa you don’t even need dates.
Wonder if it relates to the African Time concept…
I lived long enough in Yaounde, Cameroon, to attest to the reality of African time
These are among my favorite YouTube videos:
Internationalis(z)ing Code
The Problem with Time & Timezones
And these semi-unrelated videos:
Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle
Emoji and the Levitating Businessman
And this totally unrelated video:
Floating Point Numbers
The most difficult part on uniforming the date format would be USA.
They still insists on using imperial measurement system, so I can’t imagine what could happen changing the date format
Unless it’s very specific I never know what the date format is here in Canada. #SQLDate
When I saw the title I thought you’d joined eHarmony
Iirc after the Millennium Bug there was an ISO standard introduced for dates/times and we were all supposed to start formatting them like this: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
This is my favorite date format. Reason being that it is super easy to sort a list of dates/times stored in this format (as strings) ascending according to the time line.
When I started my first job after university we used dates formatted as YYYYMMDD
Date times were YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
Always zero padded so they were ALWAYS exactly that format
Made sorting trivial whether it was lexical or numerically sorted
Years later when I returned on contract to assess things for Y2K it was one of the few systems that had 0 issues in several hundred thousand lines of code. This was nice as it was payroll, job costing and various feeds into other accounting systems.
[quote=193513:@Norman Palardy]When I started my first job after university we used dates formatted as YYYYMMDD
Date times were YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
Always zero padded so they were ALWAYS exactly that format
Made sorting trivial whether it was lexical or numerically sorted
Years later when I returned on contract to assess things for Y2K it was one of the few systems that had 0 issues in several hundred thousand lines of code. This was nice as it was payroll, job costing and various feeds into other accounting systems.[/quote]
When I started working for the company I’m with now (1993!), I was given the task of totally re-engineering a system that managed patient health records, the date formats across all the code were totally inconsistent… when it was completed (1995ish) they all used a YYYYMMDD format (as Norman described above). When Y2K came along, we had to pass numerous audits, both internal and Government, and mine was the only one that passed every audit the first time, and required zero code changes. So because I did such a good job up front, I ended up having to work on everyone else’s systems
Ah yes … punish the competent !
Loved that style of managing
Its one reason I left that company
[quote=193513:@Norman Palardy]When I started my first job after university we used dates formatted as YYYYMMDD
Date times were YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
Always zero padded so they were ALWAYS exactly that format
Made sorting trivial whether it was lexical or numerically sorted
Years later when I returned on contract to assess things for Y2K it was one of the few systems that had 0 issues in several hundred thousand lines of code. This was nice as it was payroll, job costing and various feeds into other accounting systems.[/quote]
Such storage makes a lot of sense.
I usually use the Integer type for that kind of storage, e.g. storing it as the number 20150611.
If you want to break it up into the year, month and day components, it can be done extremely fast with maths (apposed to slower string manipulation methods):
Year = date \ 10000
Month = (date \ 100) mod 100
Day = date mod 100
Also, comparing dates is as easy as comparing numbers (20150611 < 20150612).
The language we used let us treat it either as a string or numeric
[quote=193208:@Alwyn Bester]It seems that in large parts of Africa you don’t even need dates.
Wonder if it relates to the African Time concept…[/quote]
So is Africa too underdeveloped to express date in any legal manner?
Visiting Trinidad recently time was expressed as “Yeah whenever man”
Seems Africa works on that system as well
I was actually just poking fun at the fact that a big portion of the African countries does not have a date format defined according to the map.
To be honest, besides for South Africa, I don’t know much about the state of software development in other African countries.
[quote=193592:@Alwyn Bester]I was actually just poking fun at the fact that a big portion of the African countries does not have a date format defined according to the map.
To be honest, besides for South Africa, I don’t know much about the state of software development in other African countries.[/quote]
In Nigeria they aren’t fussed about date formats: more about bank account formats. They want the whole world to use the 4-1-9 bank account format, from what I hear.
Just wish that dang prince who keeps writing me would just send me the darned money
[quote=193592:@Alwyn Bester]I was actually just poking fun at the fact that a big portion of the African countries does not have a date format defined according to the map.
To be honest, besides for South Africa, I don’t know much about the state of software development in other African countries.[/quote]
Chaotic would be the word for Cameroon. And yet, it is one of the richest countries in Central Africa… No standard whatsoever, but an amazingly vivacious network of cyber cafés, using Skype a lot
419 is one of the most amazing success stories of the African Internet commerce ;D