[lug] Remember Y2K?

[Bear Giles]

Why do you think that "weeks starts on Sunday" is used by the "vast
majority" of Westerners? I would have guessed "weeks starts on Monday".

On %p vs. %P, I'm sure a lot of this is historical. Someone did %p since %a
was already in use, then somebody else decided that it would be nice to
have that string in lower case but %p was already used. You can't change
existing behavior. So what do you use?


On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 5:37 PM, Jed S. Baer <blug at jbaer.cotse.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Feb 2014 06:27:45 -0700
> Davide Del Vento wrote:
>
> > > So besides being an abomination, %W I think violates the rule of least
> > > surprise.
> >
> > Besides what others have said about ISO and private businesses rules for
> > when a week starts...
> > What least surprise?
>
> The surprise that happens when you're testing or relying on a function,
> looking at your calendar and counting weeks, and getting a result you're
> not anticipating? This is surprising because, to quote Reb Tevye,
> "Tradition!" Simple observation shows that the vast majority of
> Westerners consider Sunday to the be 1st day of the week. Res ipsa
> loquitur. The least surprising thing would be, if one is using W as a
> format specifier for week, to use the most common weekday as your
> starting day. However, investigation of the man page shows that using the
> most obvious formulation isn't a strong point of that function, e.g.:
>
> %p     locale's equivalent of either AM or PM; blank if not known
> %P     like %p, but lower case
>
> Wouldn't it be more intuitive and easy to remember if the capital form of
> the format specifier produced a capitalized result?
>
> I am, indeed, thumbing my nose at ISO 8601. It dates from 1988. The
> Gregorian Calendar was established in 1582. So Phththht!
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