[mjevans]

I respect your idea of trying to make dates valid for 10x the duration of 4 digit dates; however prefix with a leading zero also often implies octal parsing. Current date formats ignore that for fields of fixed with, and make various assumptions in cases of dynamic width.

There doesn't appear to be a notation similar to the C style prefixes 0x and 0 (hex and octal), nor like the mentioned assembly language post-fixes.

It would greatly aid clarity if there were a clear way of denoting these were dates. Visually, my language parsing center is optimized to assume years are 4 or 2 digits in length. Five is confusing.

https://superuser.com/questions/885624/proper-way-to-denote-...

[b112]

Plus, it is only short term thinking, to not write it as 000001987, for example.

And what sort of long term thinking, wants all that extra electricity used to denote pre-zeros endlessly, thus increasing data transmission, disk space usage, and even calories to type it. I bet current excess power usage, is equal to at least a bucket full of coal yearly, and that adds up when thinking over 10k years or more.

[sbierwagen]

Five digit years is a Long Now foundation thing. Saying "it looks like octal" is new to me though.

[fomine3]

I've never heard the foundation until now. I'm on octal side since here's HN.

[kragen]

Hey, you're one of today's lucky ten thousand. You're in for a real treat if you like hacking — there may have lived hackers greater than Danny Hillis, but probably no more than a few dozen, perhaps none alive today. And almost none of those had access to the means to realize their potential.

The story begins:

"There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

"The Clock is real. It is now being built inside a mountain in western Texas. ..."

https://longnow.org/clock/

https://rosettaproject.org/

[kragen]

8 and 9 aren't valid octal digits since C89 :)