Re: to get local Date...
Roedy Green wrote:
On Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:57:12 +0000, Nigel Wade <nmw@ion.le.ac.uk>
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
That would be American format, we English prefer our dates in sequential order
rather than inside-out order.
ISO dates are yyyy-mm-dd
Given that almost everything you write now adays could potentially be
read by people anywhere in the world, it seems to me we would should
be avoiding national date formats and using ISO.
National dates in isolation are ambiguous.
Indeed. Trying to decide exactly what is meant by a date of the format 2/3/2008
is a big problem. Good software will use the locale, bad software will hardcode
the programmer's idea of the locale. But which did any particular piece of
software actually use?
One of the worst culprits I have to deal with is Veritas NetBackup, a rather
expensive enterprise backup system. Because it's American software all dates
are output in US format, even though the GUI interface is written in Java. It
must have taken them more work to hardcode the output format specifiers to US
than it would have done to use a Locale and its date formatters.
--
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail : nmw@ion.le.ac.uk
Phone : +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555