Xref: utzoo alt.bbs:1468 comp.sys.atari.st:24719
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!maytag!water!ljdickey
From: ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (L.J.Dickey)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs,comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: dates and time (Was: All BBS's speak English??)
Keywords: BBS,PD dates, time
Message-ID: <2950@water.waterloo.edu>
Date: 1 Feb 90 19:27:02 GMT
References: <10973@etana.tut.fi>
Reply-To: ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (L.J.Dickey)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 25

In article <10973@etana.tut.fi> av74381@korppi.tut.fi (Vesterinen Arto) writes:
 |  ...
 | I would like to make things little easier for my users and get a Finnish
 | speaking BBS software. There are also other confusing things than language,
 | for example dates should be of form dd-mm-yy, not mm-dd-yy. 

I agree that mm-dd-yy is not good, but neither is dd-mm-yy has its problems,
too.  There is international agreement on this form yyyy-mm-dd and
that is why ISO has standardized it.  Everybody understands it the
first time;  for instance 1990-02-01 would not likely be mistaken to
mean Jan 2nd.  (It makes perfect sense if you consider the logical
continuation yyyy-mm-dd hh:ss.)  You should make your bulletin
board conform to the new standard so that young bbs users will 
learn the "best" way.

 |  Time should be military time, not AM/PM form.

What makes the 24 hour clock "military" time.  There are lots of items 
used by military personnel, but that does not make the item "military".

-- 
    L. J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo.
	ljdickey@water.UWaterloo.ca	ljdickey@water.BITNET
	ljdickey@water.UUCP		..!uunet!watmath!water!ljdickey
	ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu