i think periods are used in europe and some other countries, in australia it was a space and in USA it is comma... the european use of the comma as the decimal place threw me for ages when i first arrived in europe... i do like the european 1 and 7 tho. but the period separator is an abomination, as is the decimal place, since it's also ambiguous for writing a representation of an array of numbers, colons and semicolons make zero sense

in programming languages there is a convergence going on towards using underscores and allowing you to write them as constants this way, this makes recognising the whole number as being space/symbol separated, spaces are already a primary scheme for separating symbols in source code where there is no comma or bracket/brace/parenthesis/math symbol between them

we are a long way from having a universal standard of plaintext representation though, just go look at what options you can find in spreadsheet apps

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Australia uses a space?!

Can’t we just have fucking standards for numbers…

we can’t even figure out a standard for dates

Mm/dd/year

ISO 8601 format is the best we have:

YYYY-MM-DD

Yes and works well for naming photo catalogs.

lexicographic, monotonic decreasing precision makes the most sense for dates

if you store timestamps as is done with unix, you literally turn it into human readable form for hours just by converting it to base 60 (with two decimal numbers per cipher)

then it gets messy for weeks, months and years but watcha gonna do

also for the thousands based divided units of seconds, that's also ugleh

anyway, days are not exactly 24 hours, currently for the first time in a long time they are under 24 hours, and years vary as well versus the sidreal (versus the star constellations) in a famous retrograde cycle known as the precession of the equinoxes

a random side fact about calendars also, the book of Genesis declares that 360 day years were prescribed by the Lord, which is bullshit, because Enoch goes into great detail specifying that seasons are exactly 91 days long and a year is 364

still wrong but closer. i think the only archaic calendar that doesn't get out of sync for several thousands of years is the chinese lunar calendar

and then... we could start talking about the problem of gravity and the speed of time after that, haha.

computer time representations, ie Unix Time is a pretty good universal standard tho, because it's based on measuring angles of stars against the rotation of the earth

in the actual real world tho, time is subjective by the local gravitational force, imposing standards is entirely determined by the utility based on the physical region of space it governs... what time standard would you use on mars, or in deep space? how do you even make an oscillator that is isolated from local gravity anyway?

We have 31.5.25 today. That easy.

only if you say thirty first of may, like germans say one and twenty

One and thirtyth of course

which is also a right to left descending ordering like arabic numbers, which is a right to left language

delete this

*Request delete this

I prefer YYYY-MM-DD for sortability even when treated as text

I prefer DD-MM-YYYY

its ok to be wrong

they say ein un zwanzig in german and the dutch also use this archaic old germanic back to front of tens and under tens, just like you 'muricans say may 1st while the rest of the world says 1st of may, which one is backwards? idk, talk to the arabs about it, they gave us back to front numbers as well

no, i got that backwards, may 1st is the left to right ordering, 1st of may is the murican way, and why you have mm-dd-yyyy