On Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:13:55 -0400, Brad Ferguson <thir...@frXOXed.net>
wrote:
>And you're responsible -- yes, *you* -- for me changing the way I write
>dates. I now write them as 2 November (or usually just Nov) 2011. It
>was something you said about it here, years and years ago. The fact
>that Roy thinks it's stupid only further convinces me that it's the
>right thing to do.
I noticed you did, but I didn't connect it to a previous discussion here.
Well, you're the reason I include the sentence about Judge Justice in some
of my execution reports.
>I am, however, still of an open mind as to the question of the leading
>zero in the date. I would write 2 Nov, but I have the computers render
>it as 02 Nov.
When I'm working on a computer that does that, I try to reformat it so the
leading zero isn't displayed.
Part of my preference for writing dates as an 8-digit numeric string, e.g.
18360306 for 6 March 1836, is that every programming language has its own
way of storing dates, and its own set of date comparison and date
conversion operators. They all work differently, and they usually end up
being frustratingly inadequate for whatever it is I'm trying to do. It's
madness when a single application uses SQL, VBscript, and JavaScript, and
none of them treats dates the same way as the others. The 8-digit numeric
string is easier for me to work with, because numeric and string
conversion functions generally work the same from one language to the
next. I get use to writing code that way, and the practice carries over
into other things.