Dates

[andrew]

On Thursday 2003-12-11 08:48, Graham Mullan typed:

>> Although how the hell anyone is going to adopt a standard if it is only
>> available (at ridiculous expense) on paper beats me :-(

And it really is ridiculous - 108 Swiss Francs for a thirty page document !

> And if that's too much for you, you can get an overview of how it is
> intended to work at
> 
> http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/datesandtime.html

Ah, but that only tells me what I have already known about this standard (and
its predecessors) from reading about it in New Scientist thirty years ago. You
need the full standard docs to know if it is actually useful for dates outside
the current epoch (does it tell me how to format BC dates, for example, and
can it be used to represent dates in Julian calendar ? I may not use these
dates for contemporary cave surveys, but they are clearly relevant for
archaeological surveying, and I use them every day in another context,
relying on the extremely clumsy GEDCOM format - which is at least a standard
available for free :)

Andy