[HN Gopher] Dte: A language for expressing and calculating date ...
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       Dte: A language for expressing and calculating date and time
        
       Author : nixcraft
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2021-11-13 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | bradknowles wrote:
       | The most compact ISO-8601 format doesn't use any separators
       | within the date or time values, just to designate where the date
       | field ends and where the time field begins, and that's with an
       | ASCII "T" character.
       | 
       | So long as you know what the other fields are and what their
       | sizes are, you don't really need separators.
        
       | potiuper wrote:
       | ISO(-8601) can go fly a kite. Dashes or forward slashes are
       | confusable as subtraction and division respectively between
       | numbers as year, month, and day separators. - and - do not have
       | enough of a discernible difference to matter. Periods could work
       | if not for the choice of using them to start file extensions.
       | Commas are already used to group numbers in sets of 3 significant
       | figures. Writing the year, month, and day as a sequence separated
       | by commas is distinct as the month and day are at most 2 digits.
        
         | jfarina wrote:
         | sooooo....dollar signs? Exclamation points? What would you
         | pick?
        
         | contravariant wrote:
         | My only grief with ISO8601 is that the way the timezones are
         | denoted is somewhat unfortunate. Would have been nice if we
         | could somehow have: 19:00+02:00 = 21:00+00:00 = 23:00-02:00,
         | but alas.
         | 
         | I suppose I should also be annoyed that I somehow never manage
         | to type dates in the correct format if I need to write them by
         | hand, but I'm not sure if I can blame ISO for that.
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | FWIW the symbol name specified is the Unicode "hypen-minus"
         | symbol. The subtraction dash is a separate symbol.
         | 
         | https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:8601:-1:ed-1:v1:en
         | 
         | https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+002D
         | 
         | https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2212
         | 
         | Edit: parent comment now reflects this.
         | 
         | But the point of the standard isn't to provide something that
         | everyone likes perfectly it's to provide a well defined format
         | for exchanging datetimes instead of dealing with personal or
         | cultural formats during interchange.
        
         | KMnO4 wrote:
         | Do you want to use forward slashes confusable as a multitude of
         | other things, one of which is a path separator?
         | 
         | At least you can have a file named data-2021-11-13.csv.
        
           | Jaxan wrote:
           | I worked in Germany for two years and they use dots:
           | 2021.11.13. I really like this and quickly adopted this
           | syntax myself.
           | 
           | (I guess they do it the other way around though: 13.11.2021.)
        
             | BiteCode_dev wrote:
             | Somes tools will parse it as a file extension
        
             | vasili111 wrote:
             | >13.11.2021
             | 
             | This is not only the German but most European way of
             | writing date.
        
       | macintux wrote:
       | Very interesting. I need to start collecting libraries that are
       | capable of manipulating incomplete dates; twice I've had to
       | implement that for work projects (Erlang and Python), but this
       | and pdd look promising.
        
       | jfax wrote:
       | Reminds me of the Ruby library chronic
       | https://github.com/mojombo/chronic
       | 
       | It's pretty good at natural language interpretation of dates, and
       | the basic "from today" calculations, but cool to also see here
       | natural expressions to parse between dates.
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-13 23:01 UTC)