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by GolfPopper 1 day ago
X̅ ?

(I'm a little sad the five-digit date hasn't become popular.)

1 comments

Why would five-digit years have become popular? They seem roundly a bad idea.

Years aren’t even four digits by custom: they’re just numbers, with the present idiosyncrasy of eschewing a grouping (thousands) separator. We say the sack of Rome was in 410, not 0410. Only for specific serialisation purposes have we ever recorded fixed-width dates, acknowledging that there are limits to this. The recording of two-digit or offset-by-1900 years in computer systems was a case of bad judgement. The recording of four-digit years as is presently customary is pragmatic and entirely adequate for the next few thousand years, and there’s no point in designing things beyond that horizon.