Re: First decade of the 20th century
- From: Cece <ceceliaarmstrong@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2008 12:34:58 -0700 (PDT)
On Oct 2, 5:05 pm, m...@xxxxxxx (Mark Brader) wrote:
Adrian Bailey:
I believe that train times were also written/said e.g. 12.5, rather
than 12.05.
Mike Barnes:
That's a slightly different scenario, as I'm sure you're aware. But it
does prompt me to ask about leading zeroes in dates.
Web forms often ask for dates, with the day of the month and the month
number entered separately, and they insist on two digits being entered
for each of them. Why do they do this? Is it purely programmers'
laziness...
I'm astonished. My experience is that web forms typically use a separate
pull-down menu for each field of the date, requiring much more effort
than typing a couple of digits.
or is there a tradition of leading zeroes in dates quite apart
from the (now thoroughly antiquated) fixed-width columns such as those
found on 80-column punch[ed] cards?
Certainly the first way I learned to write dates in numbers was the
style where May 20, 1970 would be written 05/20/70. (Yes, I know it'd
be 20/05/70 in some countries and among many, but not all, Canadians.
Let's not have that thread again, okay? I don't know where exactly it
was that I picked up that first style I learned.) I think I'd gotten
used to the "5/20" style, with the initial zero omitted, by the time
"9/11" happened, but it still bothers me to see leading zeroes omitted
from the second number, as in "5/2" for May 2.
Of course, the standard notation requires the leading zeroes as well as
the order year-month-day, so nobody sensible uses any of the notations
in the previous paragraph any more, just most people. But Mike asked
about "tradition".
--
Mark Brader "Hey, I don't want to control people's lives!
Toronto (If they did things right, I wouldn't have to.)"
m...@xxxxxxx -- "Coach"
My text in this article is in the public domain.
Using 5/2 for the second of May was common before computers took
over. An IBM s/360 would require that the operator of the 029 had
punched 05/02 for day and year. The exact form of the date would be
specified by the programmer, of course: mm/dd/yy or mm/dd/yyyy for
numerals, mmm or mmmm if the month was to be in letters, either
abbreviated or spelled out. (Or something like that; it's been almost
40 years!) Many younger folk have never seen anything hand-written,
it seems, only computer-generated text. Related: try telling anyone
under 30 that the time is a quarter to five.
Speaking of writing time in numbers: In the U.S., I have always seen
9:05, but in an older English-authored and -printed mystery, the time
was written as 9.5. The same book mentioned half-six; is that half
past six, or half before?
.
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