compostgoblinISO 8601
amniotic druid10:13 PM on February 27th, but how do you write the year?
TechGuy10:13pm or 8:13pm? I can see how this is confusing…
10:13 would be 2213 ?
I’m a fool
So, assuming you got the time wrong and meant you could confuse year and time of day, ISO also put time after date.
2025-05-01T18:18:03Z
Which makes sense. Higher unit to lower unit.
A_norny_mousse
5/1/2025. I’ll die on this hill.
m/d/y, so wrong by default
5/1/5 ?
The 5th January 2025, correct.
Oh please. What’s next? A twelve hour time system with am and pm? Measuring distances in thumbs and other body parts?
Worse: measuring temperatures based on what one guy felt was the coldest it could get in the winter and the hottest his fever would reach.
Don’t be ridiculous, that’s just insane.
To be fair, “thumb” was only a unit in determinating what stick we could beat our wives with.
I’ll see you in hell.
Imagine a database, or even a folder with multiple years in it. “Payroll_05-01-2025”. Now all your files are sorted by month. You would have to scroll through “Payroll_05-08-1988”… etc forever before you reach 2025. And when you do, all of 2025 isn’t together. ISO 8601 solves these issues automatically. It’s time to adapt to a better system…
pelyaFifth January 2025?
BezierI’ll call the coroner.
rnercle27.2.2013 is fine for handwriting on paper
Cid ViciousWhich month is 27?
The one after the 26th.
That’s what we Europeans call a “petty answer to the disgrace that is Amarican military time” (not the be confused with regular Amarican time and dates, which don’t allow overflow, as far as I’m aware). The date described above is clearly “the second of March, 2015” or 2015-03-02.
edgemaster72Smarch2: Electric Boogaloo
For your example, maybe. If someone writes 8/3/2012, you don’t know which is month/day. And if they shorten it to 08/03/12 you literally can’t even conclusively determine the year, much less the month or day…
8/3/2012
You do. 8th of Feb in the entire civilised world and possibly 3rd of something in Trumpistan.
8/3/2012
8th of Feb
Feb
You uh… you sure about that?
Why should I?
Amen. Shout it from the rooftops!
𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍RFC-3336
I figured there were problems with existing calendars, so I created a new one to supersede all others. That reminds me, though: I need to declare the “official” format for the calendar, to avoid all this nonsense.
I see a window of opportunity, here. Normally, there’s no chance for any calendar revision to succeed in adoption; however, I think if I use the right words with the President, I could get it pushed into adoption by fiat. Y’all had best start learning my new calendar to get ahead of everyone else.
Note for the humorously disadvantaged: the Saturnalia Calendar is a mechanism through which I’m playing with a new (to me) programming language. I am under no disillusion that anyone else will see the obvious advantages and clear superiority of the Saturnalia Calendar, much less adopt it. And no comments from the peanut gallery about the name! What, did you expect me to actually spend time thinking of a catchy name when a perfectly good, mostly unused one already existed?
UnderpantsWeevilIf it isn’t carved into a sheet of limestone using the Mayan character set, I don’t want to read about it.
That’s where I started. I wanted a little project to try V on, and had come across the IFC, so I wrote a thing. While I was doing that, I got to thinking about the deficiencies and inherited complexities in IFC, and thought up Saturnalia.
If you pop up to my profile in Sourcehut, you’ll find a similar program - just a lot longer and more complex, for IFC.
I don’t know if they makes me a genius, but yes. Yes it does.
Why does nobody mention the Discordian calendar? 5 days per week, 73 days per month, 5 months to a year (Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy and the Aftermath). On leap years, it adds one additional day (St. Tib’s day) with a name but no numerical date.
I’m a pope, but then, we’re all popes.
My problem with Discordianism is that it’s all 5s, when 6 is clearly superior, and 12 trumps them all.
Hail Eris.
Hey, I quite like this! You’re the first person I’ve found that’s thought of fixing the calendar by adopting 6-day weeks. I have a very similar personal version, with two main differences:
- there’s leap weeks instead of leap years, that way weekdays are always the same without having to skip any and every year has a whole number of weeks (either 61 most years [roughly 7 out of every 8] or 60 on short years [roughly 1 out of every 8])
- December includes this leap week and it’s either 30 or 36 days long, depending on the year
How does that work, with the leap week? Doesn’t the year drift out of alignment with the solar cycle?
Only in eight year chunks. By year seven there is more unalignment than there was in year one, but it goes back to normal on year eight. Same thing as with leap days, just a slightly bigger scale.
In fact, with current rules, [the shift in the regular Gregorian calendar becomes quite big when considering 100-year and 400-year cycles](File:Gregoriancalendarleap_solstice.svg). In theory, a leap week calendar with new and updated rules could have a very comparable if not a smaller average deviation from the true solar date, though I haven’t ran the precise calculations
Ok, so, first, let me say that while I’m enthusiastic about the concept, I understand it’s entirely theoretical. We can’t even get US civilians to adopt metric, FFS. Just a caveat, lest anyone wander by and overhear us.
That said, I did spend some cycles trying to see it it would be possibly to line up a lunar and solar calendar, and it’s not. And it isn’t nearly as important as it used to be. It would still have been nice.
So if you do run calculations, I’d like to see them.
Here they are! Orange represents my Leapweek calendar and blue is Gregorian. The Y-axis is deviation from the tropical year and the X-axis is the year number. It’s a 19200-year cycle to allow for both Gregorian and Leapweek to do entire iterations of their 400-year and 768-year cycles, respectively.
The Gregorian rules are, as you already know: if a year is divisible by 4, it is a leap year; unless it is divisible by 100, when it is a common year; unless it is also divisible by 400, in which case it is actually a leap year.
My Leapweek rules are: years divisible by 8, are leap (short, with 360 days instead of the usual 366) years, as are years divisible by 768 (after subtracting 4 so as not to clash with years divisible by 8). Just two rules as opposed to Gregorian’s three, but they result in almost perfect correction: it takes 625 000 years to fall out of sync by 1 day, as opposed to Gregorian’s 3 216 years for the same amount)
The catch is that Leapweek falls out of sync by up to 5½ days either way in between 768-year cycles, and up to 2½ days either way in between 8-year cycles. But they average out.
About the lunisolar I’m afraid to say that I ran into the same issue. Lunations are a very inconvenient duration to try and fit into neat solar days and months.
I wish it weren’t as theoretical, because I really like this calendar, but yea. It’s one of those things that will be impossible to change even though there’s arguably better options. It’s too arbitrary yet too essential and it goes in the same box as the metric second/minute/hour, the dozenal system and the Holocene calendar.
Here’s a challenge though: try and devise a Martian calendar! That one is not standardised yet. I had good fun trying to match the Martian sol and year to metric units of time and maybe giving some serious use to the kilosecond, megasecond and gigasecond
This is fantastic. I’m going to have to spend more time with it.
Since we’re discussing timescales over which there’s a not insignificant chance something radical will happen to society, there’s also the fact that the day is getting longer by 2ms every hundred years. If you’re scheduling out 625,000 years, that’s 12-some seconds by the end, compounded - 6 extra seconds every day by the 312,000th year, etc.
…if I use the right words with the President…
Depending on which president you’re referring to, those words could get you banned here.
Rich is right, since this is the date format that sorts correctly in filenames.
Won’t be true after 9999-12-31, however.
Oh no! The Y10K bug!
BigFigCan’t wait for the Y40k bug, when Tyranids begin to infect our brains.
Bold of you to assume there isn’t already a genestealer cult on Terra. Washington specifically.
That…would explain a lot
natural sort ftw
I’d be curious to see a sorting algorithm that doesn’t handle YYYYY-MM-DD with YYYY-MM-DD properly. If you drop the dashes you still get a proper numeric order. If you sort by component, you still get the proper order. Maybe a string sort wouldn’t? Off the top of my head the languages I’m thinking either put longer strings later, giving us the proper order, or could put 1YYYY- ahead of 1YYY-M so maybe string sorting is the only one that’s out.
Lexical sorting (string sorting/alphabetical order sorting) is what I believe they were referring to when talking about file names.
The fact that you don’t have to do any parsing of the string at all, just do a straight character-by-character alphabetical sort, and they will be sorted by date, is a great benifit of this date scheme. That means in situations where no special parsing is set up (eg, in a File Explorer windows showing a folder sorted alphabetically) or where your string isn’t strictly date only (eg, a file name format such as ‘2025-05-02 - Project 3.pdf’) you can still have everything sorted by date just by sorting alphabetically.
Its this benifit that is lost when rolling over to 5-digit years.
The_DecryptorIt’s an easy fix at least, just check if you’re comparing numbers on both sides and switch to a simple numerical sort.
I think Windows used to get this wrong, but it was fixed so long ago that I’m not even sure now.
JackbyDevI bet you could make a one liner to rename files with YYYY-MM-DD to 0YYYY-MM-DD fairly easily. Not a problem.
Can be solved with a small shellscript adding a leading zero to all filenames with the format.
TeamAssimilationIf humanity survives until then, we can implement 9-digit dates and delay the problem until Y100K.
If I, my software, or my data last this long, I will have nearly 8000 years to resolve it. Which is to say, the year 9998 is going to get busy.
And it is easily extensible to YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss to include the time of day
Are you an obsidian user?