[BenDaglish]

Personally, when I first read the spec. for time.Format, I thought "well how bleedin' sensible is that?!" The only thing that annoys me is that it isn't in ISO order (I'd have preferred 2001-02-03 14:05:06 ), but all that you need to remember is "2006-01" and the rest just falls naturally into place. I've seen a couple of "complaints" about this over the last few days, and I just don't understand what the problem is. It's logical and neat.

[fafner]

> and the rest just falls naturally into place

No, the timezone string is messed up:

2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00

If they had picked

2000-01-02T15:04:05Z06:00

(03 would make more sense but then there would be issues with 12h vs 24h clock)

then they could even express ISO 8601 week number and the corresponding year. Something which is not possible at the moment. Although more difficult to remember it would be 52 and 1999. (For the 2006 it is 01 and 2006 not distinguishable)

[ustolemyname]

ISO ordering would make expressing time in AM/PM ambiguous, i.e. the format string "2:05PM".

[tjradcliffe]

But why would you want to? FSM intended us to use ISO-8601 dates and nothing else. If you disagree, I'll meet you on 18/06/12 at 2:04 to discuss the issue, although you have no way of knowing what date or time that string actually refers to.

We have a perfectly good, unambigious date and time format. It's true that many users are deeply committed to ambiguous formats, but we should at the very least be trying to dissuade them from using them by making ISO formats the default.

[BenDaglish]

I messed up - I meant 2001-02-03 04:05:06 , in which case 2:05PM would be format "4:05PM", (or 16:05) . All that'd happen would be the year and seconds swap order in the "123456" format - but as I said, it's a minor quibble.

[lifthrasiir]

12:34:56 2007-08-09 would work equally, though. (EDIT: oops, no.)

[ustolemyname]

How do I cleanly express single digit minutes?

The format string "4 minutes after 12", is unique, but it's not clear that I could turn "34" into "4". Similar for the hour (12 is now 2).

That would also break the "Print this exact time in the format you're currently using" method of creating a compatible time format string.

[fafner]

That's not ISO format though.

[Shivetya]

when importing dates and time from small systems it always amazes me how they screw them up... do they just ignore known standards for a reason? (favorite was dropping leading zeroes in an otherwise ISO format)