Re: Internationalized dates (was Internationalized error messages)

On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 11:11:46AM +0100, Karel Zak wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 10:58:02PM +0100, Kaare Rasmussen wrote:
> > Now you're talking about i18n, maybe someone could think about input and
> > output of dates in local language.
> > 
> > As fas as I can tell, PostgreSQL will only use English for dates, eg January,
> > February and weekdays, Monday, Tuesday etc. Not the local name.
> 
>  May be add special mask to to_char() and use locales for this, but I not
> sure. It isn't easy -- arbitrary size of strings, to_char's cache problems
> -- more and more difficult is parsing input with locales usage. 
> The other thing is speed...
> 
>  A solution is use number based dates without names :-(

ISO has published a standard on date/time formats, ISO 8601.  
Dates look like "2001-03-22".  Times look like "12:47:63".  
The only unfortunate feature is their standard format for a 
date/time: "2001-03-22T12:47:63".  To me the ISO date format
is far better than something involving month names. 

I'd like to see ISO 8601 as the default data format.

--
Nathan Myers
ncm@zembu.com