Timestamp

[Paul L. Allen]

Andreas Ericsson writes: 

> Greg Vickers wrote: 
>
>> Andreas Ericsson wrote: 
>> 
>>> Richard Gliebe wrote:

>>> does this for you. You can either pipe the log to it or give it one or 
>>> more filenames to parse. The output format is in european style, so it 
>>> looks like this; 2005-09-21 21:30:41

For some values of "European."  21/09/2005 21:30:41 is normal in some
parts of Europe.  That output format is a slightly-mangled ISO date/time
format which (as far as I know) was not an ordering in common use in
Europe until ISO came up with it (and probably still isn't commonly
used outside of some of the IT industry). 

>> Thank god! Who mixes up the order of significance (i.e. yy-dd-mm) in 
>> dates anyway??? :p 
>> 
> 
> The british, the US folks, aussies and some other backwards people.

It's more complex than that.  Most of the US uses mm/dd/yyyy but the US
military uses dd/mm/yyyy. 

> The logical thing to do with any form of numerals is to write out the
> field incremented most often last.

So mm-yyyy-dd would be logical?  The logical thing to do is to keep the
fields in the order in which they change, whether that's dd/mm/yyyy or
yyyy/mm/dd.  Which was probably what you meant, but not what you said. 

> It's how we count,

In some cultures.  Others reverse that order, and with some justification.
If I write 314159265358979 you have to count digits, or read the number
in reverse, to find the order of magnitude.  Whereas in a culture which
writes 979855356295413 you know it is nine plus seventy plus nine-hundred
plus eight-thousand plus fifty thousand plus... three-hundred (US)
trillion.  In those "reversed" cultures reading out the number one digit
at a time also gives you the magnitude of the final digit whereas in the
"non-reversed" cultures extra steps are involved. 

It is only convention that has some cultures say "seventy-one" (or, in
some languages, "seventy and one") rather than "one seventy" or "one and
seventy."  Prior to the invention of the decimal point there was more
justification for "one and seventy" than "seventy and one" (and still is,
because most people encounter more integers than decimals). 

> It also sorts nicely.

That is a bonus.  It might even be the reason ISO adopted that ordering
although I suspect their main, if not only, justification was that it
could not be confused with any other commonly-used ordering (where the year
is never the first item). 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support 



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