Are there any 'fixincludes' experts here?

Toon Moene toon@moene.org
Sun Jan 17 23:03:00 GMT 2010


Dr. David Kirkby wrote:

> I thought the day-month-year was the most logical, increasing in size 
> from left to right. I agree the American way is silly.

Hmmm, obviously, you never have to compute the difference of two dates, 
or add a certain amount of time to a date.

Trust me - I have been working in meteorology now for over 18 years: The 
most efficient representation of dates is YYYYMMDDHHmmss (4 digit years 
followed by a 2 digit month, followed by a 2 digit day-in-the-month, 
followed by a 2 digit hour-in-the-day, followed by a 2 digit 
minute-of-the hour, followed by a 2 digit second-of-the-minute.

It sorts lexicographically in the right way, too.

Oh, and for the Y2K skeptics: Yes, we wrote this as YYMMDDHHmmss prior 
to the 1999-2000 new year and yes, it would have had enormous 
consequences if we didn't fix it in time (which we did, almost - I made 
the mistake of allowing the IT department to update the operating system 
of our operational machine before the 29th of February 2000 - that 
provoked a lot of havoc, because it was not really an update - it was 
just a security fix to an older version of the OS).

Needless to say, I was unreachable for this "challenge" - I was in Las 
Vegas for a Fortran Standardization Committee meeting ;-)

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html



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