Re: mutt/1296: iso date/time format by default
On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 10:26:59AM +0100, Dickon Hood wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 00:05:02 +0200, Alain Bench wrote:
> : On Thursday, September 22, 2005 at 4:02:02 PM +0200, Rado Smiljanic wrote:
>
> : > mutt is not only/ primarily used in US/UK, meaning the am/pm for hours
> : > could be changed in favour of more widespread usage (i.e. 24h).
>
> : How much the am/pm thing seems ugly to us, as a default setting it
> : is consistent with other defaults and especially the English C locale.
> : Anyone using another language has to change this anyway. I think it
> : makes sense to keep 12h clock as default.
>
> It's really only an Americanism these days. I'm English, and I, along
> with a large number of people, use 24h clock by default.
Likewise. I use 24hr time whenever I want to be precise, though both
forms colloquially.
I've just done some experimenting with LC_TIME and strftime's "preferred"
(%c) format. C, POSIX, en_GB, fr_FR, de_DE, es_ES, and es_MX all used
the 24 hour clock, only en_US and en_CA of the ones I tried used 12 hour
and AM/PM. That is contrary to the assertion above about the C
locale - at least for my system.
I also note that almost everyone in the mailing list is using the 24
hour clock in their message Date headers, even the Americans :-).
I would suggest that the default should be 24 hour time, but that the
changing to an ISO default is left until it becomes the default LOCALE
setting. Anyone who wants something different can of course easily
override.
> mutt's AM / PM is wrong anyway. It's '3:15pm' not '03:15pm'; the initial
> '0' is dropped in 12h clock (or so I was taught at primary school $mumble
> years ago).
More seriously the rule that "Noon is treated as pm and midnight as am"
is arbitrary. I would never use either am or pm for those, rather I
would say "12 noon" or "12 midday" - or better still 12:00 (using 24 hr
clock). If you ask someone to meet you at "12 pm", you're most likely
to get an "Eh, when?"
> And don't get me started on US date format.
Quite, I never quote dates as 01/02/03 - too ambiguous. I always put
the month in letters, 1-Feb-03. Everyone did know that was what was
meant, didn't they :-) ?
--
John F Hall