On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 9:59 PM, Hiro Asari <redmine / ruby-lang.org> wrote: > Issue #2378 has been updated by Hiro Asari. > > > I beg to differ. If you tell 100 programmers that "11-09" is some combination of date and time, I wager that the vast majority will answer: "November 9th", "11th of September" or "November, 2009", maybe "2011 September". > > Maybe we should only support ISO 8601, in which case "nn-nn" seems invalid (please correct me if I'm wrong). ISO 8601 is really for computer interchange of time date information as I understand it. That's important, but most use cases of date parsing would I think deal with parsing user input, and that has to deal with the vagaries of world culture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_by_country To most non-Americans 9/11 means September 11, but to the rest of the world it means November 9. Personally when I write dates I tend to write either 11 September or 9 November for this reason. Ruby 1.8 tried to deal with this with heuristics, but I realize that the problem is pretty hard, -- Rick DeNatale Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale