Dates

Olly Betts olly@survex.com
Wed, 10 Dec 2003 18:54:40 +0000


On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 02:20:40PM -0500, Ralph Hartley wrote:
> Olly Betts wrote:
> >I'm in the process of adding date storage to Survex, and I'm wondering
> >how other cave surveying software typically represent dates?
> 
> Regardless of what other cave surveying software uses, there is a *very* 
> well thought out international standard for date and time.
> 
> It is known as ISO 8601, and I *stongly* suggest that you use it.

I'm aware of this standard, but from what I've read it only really
covers textual representations, and I've already dealt with that
part (I do indeed use YYYY-MM-DD).

I'm more interested in choosing an internal representation which
doesn't lead to interoperability problems (for example, if I were to
use a Unix time_t I couldn't import Compass data with dates prior to
1970).

Cheers,
    Olly