| William M. Klein 2005-11-25, 3:55 am |
| I do NOT know how universal it is for "data processing" in Asia, but IBM has
supported at least two Asian "year" formats since the beginning of Language
Environment. See:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-...PPENDIX1.2Check out <JJJJ> - Japanese era name in DBCS characters and <CCCC> <CCCCCCCC> - Era name in DBCS characters"Oliver Wong" <owong@castortech.com> wrote in
messagenews:kLlhf.130485$S4.22362@edtnps84...> "James J. Gavan" <jgavandeletethis@shaw.ca> wrote in messagenews:SK7hf.594161$tl2.451888@pd7tw3no...>>>> So Oliver, to your knowledge, anything wrong in Asia going with the ISODate Standard ? When an 'Anglo'
speaker is thinking 'translate' he is basinghis thinking probably on European languages. But of course, products do getsold East of Suez :-)>>>> ccyymmdd = 2005 Nov 24, 2005 November 24, 2005/11/24, 2005-11-24 adnauseum.....>> I really don't know much
about what calendars and date/formats are usedin Asia, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. I heard, forexample, that there's a "Buddhist Calendar", but I have no idea how often itis used, if at all.>> According to this Microsoft guide on glo
balization ...>> http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/...s/wrg_date.mspx>> ... the Japanese, at least, seem to be using a "year, month, day" orderwhen using the Gregorian calendar (that's the calendar we North Americanstypically use). I believe
the Japanese also have their own calendar, whereeach era (our equivalent to eras would be "BC" and "AD") changes relativelyfrequently (I believe it changes every time a new Emperor is crowned orsomething like that). My Japanese friends seem to be able to
use both theJapanese calendar and the Gregorian calendar, and can switch between the twowith relative ease.>> Can't really comment on any of the other Asian calendars listed on thatpage (Taiwainese, Korean, Thai, etc.) as I don't know anything about t
hem.>> I think your best bet, if you want to make your software globallyaccessible, is to store your dates in some internally well defined format(doesn't matter what the format is; it could internally be stored asGregorian; or as number of days since 1
970, January 1st; or any othersystem) and then have various functions which, given a date in this internalformat, return a string representing the format in the given locale (e.g."toGregorianCalendarString()", "toJapaneseCalendarString()", etc.) That'sapp
roximately the interface that the Java and .NET code libaries provide(except that they have hooks into the OS to detect the appropriate localeautomatically).>> - Oliver>
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