Re: use of locale in "ls" again (Re: Japanese expression of date)

[Markus Kuhn]

Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote on 2001-12-20 23:41 UTC:
>    - whether German people accept ISO expression or not
>    and
>    - whether all people in the world accept ISO expression or not.
>    We can discuss here the former point but cannot the latter, because
>    people from all over the world are not here.
>
> Conclusion:  'localization' way is better.  'standardization' way
> has no merits.

Firstly:

The nice thing about free software is that you get what you pay for. The
*only* people who matter as far as user requirements are concerned are
those who develop and perhaps those who take the time to carefully
document and justify their personal preferences in bug reports and
feature suggestions. Philosophical and hypothetical speculations about
uneducated preferences of absent and silent users won't bring us
further. Therefore, we should only be interested in what *YOU* need, not
in what you think that others think that you should think for them.

So:

*I* strongly like standardization on the ISO date and time notation all
over the planet in GNU software. I don't know a single person so far,
who has a problem with the ISO format and it is in many ways simpler and
more elegant. The full ISO date notation yyyy-mm-dd is already very
widely accepted and I think we can reasonably expect both Japanese and
US users to be mentally flexible enough to survive the gentle -60°
rotation from / to - unless someone quotes a deeply rooted cultural
binding to these separators. I otherwise have every reason to believe
that they all are just historic accidents without deeper significance
and there is no compelling reason against standardization.

Considering that Japan has already used a bigendian ordering before and
considering that Germans had a deeply rooted afinity for the
little-endian dotted notation, namely dots signal in German ordinal
numbers (1. = 1st, 2. = 2nd, etc.) and numeric dates are in German
pronounced as littleendian ordinal numbers, I would like to claim that
Germans make already the greatest cultural sacrifice when they accept
the international date notation, and it should be orders of magnitude
less of a problem for e.g. Japanese or US users, as both their
traditional notations have already been far closer to the ISO notation
than say the German one. Therefore, if even Germans can get used to
ISO 8601, which other users of the Gregorian alphabet and the
indo-arabic decimal system on this planet should have a problem with it?

So apart from having heard rumours of general xenophobic tendencies in
such issues, I have not yet understood a specific Japanese cultural
problem with the ISO date and time notation.

I thought, the controversy was anyway only about the non-ISO MM-YY
notataion, not about the YY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DD ISO 8601 notations.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>