Re: Days of the year

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU>]

Michael Lewis <lewism -at- BRANDLE -dot- COM -dot- AU> said:
> There is, as far as I know, no computing term for the conventional
> representation of a date as "year, month-of-year, and day-of-month".

Just the informal ones, like "why-why em-em dee-dee" for YYMMDD
and "dee-dee em-em why-why" for DDMMYY.

> NB: a major benefit of julian dates is sorting into date sequence,
> provided you put the year first. However, the same benefit is
> offered by ISO date format yymmdd. I suspect the yyddd format arose
> from the same byte-saving urge as the two-digit year

YYDDD or YYYYDDD also lets you calculate short time intervals very
easily -- for example 97329 - 97072 = 257 days. Year boundaries and
leap years can be accounted for with a little extra effort.  YYMMDD
dates sort neatly, as you say, but the arithmetic is much messier.

YYYYDDD has some advantages as an internal storage format:
- it's a useful lingua franca for exchanging data between different
  systems
- it's already in a convenient format for sorting and calculations
- it's compact, saving valuable storage space on punch cards

As for which display format is best -- DD/MM/YY, MM/DD/YY, DD.MM.YY,
YYYY-MM-DD -- that choice should given to the user as a configurable
setting.

John, according to my AGPS (Australian Government Publishing Service)
Style Guide, the ISO standard ISO 2711 relates to date formats.
---
Stuart Burnfield                What the critics said about Stuart Burnfield:
Functional Software Pty Ltd             "Nasty, brutish and short. . ."
mailto:slb -at- fs -dot- com -dot- au                            -- Hobbes 'Leviathan'


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