5 Digit Dates (was RE: Euro currency sign)

I concur with David especially when you expand the scope of dates to
include that used by applications (not just the system date). I've
worked on software that had to operate on dates in the middle of the
next millenium (related to nuclear facility management) and way beyond
(astronomy software for predicting eclipses and unusual alignments).
It's a royal pain when the system software doesn't handle this.

John
> -----Original Message-----
> From:	David Perrell [SMTP:davidp@earthlink.net]
> Sent:	Thursday, October 23, 1997 5:08 PM
> To:	Martin Bryan; www-international@w3.org; www-html@w3.org
> Subject:	Re: Euro currency sign
> 
> Martin Bryan wrote:
> 
> >You have a computer which will be able to accept the power supply
> sources
> >that will be arround in 9999AD?
> 
> Who knows? There may not be a 9999AD. But a standard date format that
> disallows references to pre-0000 and post-9999 dates is short-sighted.
> 
> >If you want to deal with all dates, irrespective of Era, I suggest
> you
> adopt
> >the set of date definitions in ISO/IEC 10744, HyTime, which are
> designed to
> >allow an SGML representation of all dates. This will allow you to
> specify
> >the above date using the Julian, Gegorian, Hebrew, Chinese,....
> calendars
> >without ambiguity.
> 
> Can you point to an overview of HyTime?
> 
> David Perrell
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 23 October 1997 20:33:15 UTC