On: Dte: A language for expressing and calculating dat...

[l-]

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.

[zamadatix → l-]

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 → l-]

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 → KMnO4]

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 → Jaxan]

Somes tools will parse it as a file extension

[vasili111 → Jaxan]

>13.11.2021

This is not only the German but most European way of writing date.

[riffraff → vasili111]

I don't think this is true, Italy uses generally slashes d/m/y or dashes d-m-y. France and Spain use slashes d/m/y. The Netherlands appear to use dashes: d-m-y. Hungary uses dots, but they use the y.m.d order. Sweden uses y-m-d.

You can play with this in JS :)

    const event = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 20, 3, 0, 0));
    const options = { weekday: 'long', year: 'numeric', month: 'numeric', day: 'numeric' };
    console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('de-DE', options));
    console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('it-IT', options));
    console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('fr-FR', options));
    console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('hu-HU', options));
    console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('sv-SE', options));
    console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('es-ES', options));
    console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('nl-NL', options));

[contravariant → l-]

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.

[fanf2 → contravariant]

The timezone sign convention is the same as the longitude sign convention: east is positive. The lat/long conventions are documented in ISO 6709, but they predate that standard, though I have not found a good history of it.

Note that these sign conventions are not universal: for example, POSIX has the reverse sign on timezone offsets because west positive was more convenient for american unix developers. There are similar oddities for longitude.

[contravariant → fanf2]

I can understand the reasoning behind it. But it's still unfortunate.

[emmelaich → l-]

There is a more compact, less ambiguous, more universal format in my opinion: ddMMMyyyy, e.g. 28feb2021.

Yes, it's English month abbreviations but few people worldwide would not be able to take the obvious meaning.

(it's a MIL/NATO standard afaik, and has been in use for 50+ years)

(edit, timezones are single letter, e.g. Z for Zulu aka UTC)

[politician → emmelaich]

Doesn't sort well.

[catlifeonmars → politician]

Yeah. ISO8601 being alphabetically sortable is one of its most useful features.

[emmelaich → politician]

GNU sort has support for month names.

[jfarina → l-]

sooooo....dollar signs? Exclamation points? What would you pick?

[Toutouxc → jfarina]

Is dd[poop emoji]yyyy[poop emoji]mm too informal?

[wruza → Toutouxc]

Why not [heart emoji], these are dates after all.