Re: re meeting at Xtech

[Jon Bosak <bosak@boethius.eng.sun.com>]

[tallen@sonic.net:]

| | Mary McRae informs me that the OASIS meetings will indeed be on
| | 2000.02.03.  Shall we try for (a) a full day, (b) a half day, or (c)
| | starting after 5 and going to dinner?
| | 
| | Given the amount we have to do, I incline toward (a) and (c).
| 
| In English, which day is 2000.02.03?  February 3rd or March 2nd?

It's February 3 (which is wrong, of course; I meant March 3).
This format is very easy to remember: it's the only one in which
an alpha sort will actually sort dates into order.  This is the
order specified by the ISO data format, but as far as I know, only
the Japanese, the Swedes, and a few standards geeks actually use
it.  I adopted it years ago because of the nice things it does for
file sorting on Unix systems, but recently I've noticed that it
works nicely for specifying ranges, e.g.:

   2000.02.28-29
   2000.02.28-03.02
   2000.02.28-2001.06.01

These no longer sort correctly, but they are very easy to write.

| Our confusion is between March 2nd and 3rd.

Yes.  I should have written "2000.03.03".

Jon