[lug] Remember Y2K?

[Davide Del Vento]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 8:18 PM, Bear Giles <bgiles at coyotesong.com> wrote:

> 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".
>

I would have agreed, but why guess when we have an encyclopedia at our
fingertips?

Wikipedia page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_day_of_the_week#Numbered_days_of_the_weekseems
a little strange in this regard, in that it does mention mostly east
European, east and obscure countries and not very many west ones.

(clicking clicking).

Here is instead a nice map that shows that's basically even:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week#Week_numbering -- it may be
what you say for America, but it is what I and Bear say for Europe. China
and India, where the vast majority of world's population is, are evenly
split as well (should one of them change, that what the most common would
become).



>
> 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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>
>
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