Mon Nov 12 09:49:02 2018

[Phil Last]

The subject of this thread is the weekday, month, monthday, time and year as displayed in the session when I just loaded Dyalog APL.

Why?

Why does Dyalog provide the session start time in such a peculiar format?

Is this standard across all (or even some others (or even one other)) APLs?

p.s. I've been meaning to ask this question for years. (Perhaps I need to get a life.)

[AndyS|Dyalog]

I think because it seemed like a good idea many years ago - I've gone back to 8.2 from 2002 and the banner has the same timestamp format.

We've had a look at other APLs and there appears to be no consistency between their banners.

I doubt if we would want to change the timestamp format though .. there are those (particularly on non-Windows platforms) who redirect output and are probably parsing the timestamp and I'm not sure that the effort that we would impose on them is justified ..

[Roger|Dyalog]

ISO 8601 specifies a standard format for timestamps.

[JohnS|Dyalog]

Historical note: in an early version, I managed to make the session banner OCD-compliant by having the Dyalog version ... line and the timestamp line the same length.

[Richard|Dyalog]

The format is the default of the standard C library date formatting functions:

http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Formatting-Calendar-Time.html

[Bob Armstrong]

I evolved quite a few years ago to the format

Code: Select all

Fri.Dec,20121228

for "daylns" and simple floats ,

Code: Select all

20181121.2142

, for time stamps .

Easily parsable , pickup-able and sortable .

Never really settled on delta from UTC because I don't get around that much . Guess I'd just use simple +-offset .

Incidentally , my demo of CoSy at this year's Forth Day at Stanford is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXBeFSOTrK4&t=8880s .