[PD-dev] common date format for Pd

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Since Pd only has 19bits of integer resolution, we can't use UNIX  
time within Pd. So I was thinking that perhaps ISO format would would  
well in Pd since its a symbol:

For example:

Today is 2006-06-12.  This email was sent written at 12:40:23.  All  
of this can be lumped together as 20060612T124023.  I am not sure if  
this ISO unified date/time format officially supports fractional  
seconds, but since it does support fractional seconds in the time  
(12:40:23.2342), and the digit positions are fixed, so I think we can  
easily just tack on fractional seconds like this:  
20060612T124023.2342.  I think keeping the "." is preferable since  
ISO 8601 says 12:40:23.2342 can be shorted to 124023.2342, but I  
didn't see mention of 1240232342.

One problem is that ISO 8601 allows you to omit the separators "-"  
and ":", which would then make it a float in Pd, and therefore it  
would be truncated to 6 digits.  So we couldn't support that.

Here's a page all about ISO 8601 date/time formats:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html#time

Thoughts? Comments? Flames? ;)

.hc

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