RE: [xsl] Q on ISO TimeDate convertion

Subject: RE: [xsl] Q on ISO TimeDate convertion
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2001 16:16:29 -0500
Mark--

At 11:05 AM 11/8/01, you wrote:
12:00am is the middle of the night when many people (apart from Mike,
who, judging from the timestamps on his postings, never sleeps) are
asleep.  12:00pm is "the middle of the day, at least for farmers, when
one traditionally eats lunch.  Think of 12 as really meaning 0 and the
am/pm as being the high order bit of the time of day.

The point I'm unclear about is whether 12:00am belongs to the same day
as 11:59pm or as 12:01am.

Given that "a.m." is "ante meridian" and "p.m.", "post meridian", then properly speaking neither 12:00 noon (at the meridian) nor 12:00 midnight (opposite the meridian) is either a.m. or p.m., is it?


Of course, I'm saying this without consulting what the spec says. In this fallen world, I'm sure one or the other was assigned a.m., the other, p.m., just to keep the standard simpler and more confusing. 12:00 midnight would belong to neither day, but inasmuch as it is considered 12:00am, I think that should make it the first minute of the day not the last, right? (If it's the last, then 720 minutes of p.m. are followed by one minute of a.m. before the day changes at 12:01 to get another 719 minutes of a.m.)

> They'll be asking to do pounds, shillings and pence next.

I think that for as long as we've had a national currency, it's been
decimal.  Imagine how funny our spreadsheets looked when the stock
exchanges started pricing shares in $1/16ths.

Now, really to split the difference between a decimal standard and one that favors even divisions by twos, threes and fours, we should switch everything to base-12 numbering systems shouldn't we?


To make this a post about XSL, maybe we should contemplate doing this and getting rid of the mod operator while we're at it. (Who needs grouping anyway?)

Cheers,
Wendell (back from his Deutschland-Reise)



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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