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

[Miles Bader]

address@hidden (Paul Jarc) writes:
> >    -r--r--r--    1 eggert   eggert       4012 2001-11-20 .profile
> >    -rw-rw-r--    1 eggert   eggert          0 4 16:10:01 today
> >
> > (That '4' stands for Thursday.)  Yuck.
> 
> Would it be any better to use the day of the month?  That would take
> one extra column, but would be more silimar to existing formats, and
> might be less confusing.

I think it would be confusing, for the same reason that the `MM-DD'
notation is: it's not familiar, and doesn't match any obvious pattern
(whereas the four-digit year in YYYY-MM-DD provides a big clue to what
the whole thing means, for people who've never seen that particular
format before).

Personally, I think the `MM-DD HH:MM' notation is `good enough' -- the
fact that `MM-DD' is followed by an obvious time provides a pretty big
hint that it's a date, and the fact that it uses `-' instead of `/'
serves to alert e.g. Americans that the order of the elements may not be
what they're used to.  I suspect that people would get used to it soon
enough, and would like its relative consistency once they're used to it.

-Miles
-- 
Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.