Re: ls default time style

[Hans-Bernhard Broeker]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:
> Markus Kuhn writes:

>> > -rw-r--r--    1 bin     bin      2188323 12-03 00:00 fileutils-4.1.3.tar.gz
>> > -rw-r--r--    1 bin     bin      1812537 2001-04-29  fileutils-4.1.tar.gz
>> > 
>> > This date format HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN in Germany and is totally
>> > unintelligible to any user.
>> 
>> ... You will see, that it lists both the old
>> little-endian dotted all-numeric format (24.08.1998) as well as the
>> modern international standard form (1998-08-24).

> I was talking about the "12-03" line which means 3rd of December, not
> 12th of March. I repeat that it has never been seen in Germany.

Nor was it anywhere else.  But then, we Germans never before used to
have dates written with '-' separators, so there's not that big a
chance anyone will misread this by making a wrong assumption.

And that's exactly the rationale behind that POSIX way of writing the
date with '-' separators, and ordered completely in "big endian"
style, I think It's an internally consistent way that makes everyone
blink at first sight, so everyone can finally agree on *one* way to
interpret at least *one* way of writing dates.  Before, people from
Britain and the U.S. would always be at odds whether 12/03/1999 meant
December, the 3rd, or March, the 12th.  There would have been no
chance whatsoever that one of them would have agreed to the others'
way, I think.  So now, the standard says they're both wrong, and
everyone is equally unhappy for a while.  Sometimes, there's nothing
but a clean cut to disentagle the Gordic knot.

Anyway, "has never been seen" is not a good argument compared to
"should have been done that way right from the start, but wasn't".

> Except for the YYYY-MM-DD (ISO 8601) form, Germans always put the day
> before the month.

Yes. But even so, YYYY-MM-DD is the official DIN notation, now, AFAIK.
I.e. if you work in or for a government institution, this is *the* one
officially allowed way to write a date in pure numerical form, now.
And by extension, any shorter form (like one leaving out the year)
might just as well be a recognizable subset of the long one.

> But by default, output of programs like "ls" are parsed by a human
> user.

And as long as there's no chance of that human misunderstanding what
he sees, all is well.
-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (address@hidden)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.