Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: CNews - now a pedantic software! : -(
Message-ID: <3313@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 3 Apr 91 18:41:57 GMT
References: <3NIP9ZB@methan.chemie.fu-berlin.de> <27F63B37.CFD@tct.com> <1991Apr02.183535.13886@buster.stafford.tx.us> <1991Apr3.001125.2057@zoo.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 36

In article <1991Apr3.001125.2057@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

| Geoff is the guilty party on this stuff, although I agree with most of
| his decisions.  And RFC1036 itself strongly recommends bending the rules
| on date checking (and only on date checking).

  I'm going to make a suggestion here, and let whoever agrees with my
vision of the future run with it. In a few years we will have a date
rollover. While a date containing, for instance, 91 and 04, is obviously
parsable into day of the month and year, that won't be true shortly.

  Consider a data spec as follows:
	month	three letters, capitalised
	day	one or two digit number 1..31
	year	four digit number
	time	three groups of two digit numbers, colon separated
	TZ	three uppercase characters or a one or two digit
		number starting with + or -.

  This is almost like the fields in RFC1036 (as I remember, I have to
get a new copy), except the year. It has the advantage that every field
may be differentiated from every other, and therefore order is no longer
important. This seems like a wonderful idea, given that we're talking
about a missing space.

  Wouldn't it be nice to allow any order, one or more blanks or tabs as
delimiters, and worry about important things?

  If people agree with me perhaps something could be done. If you think
it's a good idea, but too early to worry, you must be unfamiliar with
the time for a good idea to become practice on usenet. And if nothing is
done the need will (or lack of it) will be obvious after it's too late ;-)
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
        "Most of the VAX instructions are in microcode,
         but halt and no-op are in hardware for efficiency"