Re: Date conventions

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 07 1998 - 07:57:45 EST


At 4:44 AM -0600 2/7/98, Ward Powers wrote:
>>>The date 11/9/96 will mean either 11th September or 9th November, depending
>>>what part of the world a person comes from and what he is used to.
>>>
>>>Could I make the suggestion, in the interests of avoiding ambiguity and
>>>having to work out what date is meant, that on b-greek we might adopt the
>>>convention of writing the date as yymmdd (year/year/month/month/day/day).
>>>Thus 11th September 1996 would be 960911, and 9th November would be 961109.
>
>As your quote (above) from my post shows, I made a suggestion, in the
>interests of avoiding ambiguity, with the thought in mind that it may
>perhaps commend itself to some list members on the basis of its own good
>sense and inner logic.

For what it's worth, and I realize that's not very much, I've been using
Ward's suggested format myself for marking documents by date simply because
it assures that the order of the documents in the directory list will be
chronologically ordered (unless I deliberately tell the directory to use a
different ordering criterion), but I've never thought of this in terms of a
Kantian categoreal imperative.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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