Re: Interesting programming description for bank selection

From: Marko Mäkelä <marko.makela_at_iki.fi>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 08:50:52 +0300
Message-ID: <20140423055052.GA4608@x220>
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 09:41:54PM +0200, silverdr@wfmh.org.pl wrote:
>
>> At least you got the annoying AM/PM problem fixed where it counts and
>> just use the 24hr scale. There are still some holdouts though...
>
>Like the date of 11/10/12.. <- who outside the US knows FOR SURE what 
>day it is supposed to represent?

Well, is there any place in the world that would natively use strictly 
big-endian or strictly little-endian notation for times? In many places, 
the ISO 8601 notation is widely understood, but not used natively:

2014-04-23T06:28:38+00:00
2014-04-23T06:28:38Z

BTW, the American influence is showing there too: The Z short-hand 
notation for UTC is the US military Zulu time.

German-influenced countries are not logical either: it is 

dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm:ss (little endian for date, big-endian for time)

Luckily we Europeans do not use am/pm in times. If we used it, I guess 
it should be before the hours: pm12:00 to be entirely big-endian.

Another place for mixed-endian notation is addresses, such as in URLs 
(hostnames are "least significant part first" while IP addresses and 
file names are "most significant part first").

In physical addresses, the North American notation is almost 
little-endian:

GivenName FamilyName
Organization
StreetNumber StreetName
City ZipCode
Country

To be fully little-endian, it should be ZipCode City, assuming that 
there are multiple zip codes in a city, and never multiple cities 
sharing a zip code.

We Europeans should keep quiet about the US date formats, because the 
German-influenced countries (most of continental Europe) are writing the 
street name before the street number, breaking the little-endian order.  
Decades ago, someone who used to live in Iso-Roobertinkatu (translated: 
Big Robert's Street) repeatedly got snailmail to "150 Roobertinkatu" :)

For what it is worth, if the Austrian painter-corporal had gotten his 
way and he hadn't been suspicious of quantum physics, the world could 
now be using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units and on the other 
hand, Commodore would not have come to existence.

The imperial system could have been developed further too: 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/

	Marko

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Received on 2014-04-23 06:00:49

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