RE: [xsl] Q on ISO TimeDate convertion

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

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@mulberrytech.com
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