Timestamp

[Greg Vickers]

Paul L. Allen wrote:
> Andreas Ericsson writes:
>> Greg Vickers wrote:
>>> Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>>>> Richard Gliebe wrote:
> 
> It's more complex than that.  Most of the US uses mm/dd/yyyy but the US
> military uses dd/mm/yyyy.

God, you're kidding?? Surely that makes things a leetle confusing at 
times...

> 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).

Thanks for posting the script Andreas, and thanks Paul for some 
insightful statements about number counting, there's some things I 
hadn't thought of before :)

-- 
Greg Vickers
Project Manager, IT Security
Information Technology Services
Queensland University of Technology
L12, 126 Margaret St, Brisbane

Phone: (07) 3864 9536
Email: g.vickers at qut.edu.au
IT Security web site: http://www.its.qut.edu.au/itsecurity/

CRICOS No. 00213J


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