[Python-Dev] Re: proposal: add basic time type to the standard library

Tim Peters tim@zope.com
Tue, 26 Feb 2002 18:08:10 -0500


[Skip Montanaro]
> ...
> Of course, neither Apple's nor Microsoft's efforts in this area will help
> the poor person trying to emit a dynamic web page containing "correctly"
> formatted dates.  You still have to guess or just fall back to something
> most everyone can deduce.

No, MS languages support APIs for high-level things like FormatCurrency(),
and some have dedicated Currency, Time and Date types.  You don't *get*
low-level control under these things, and the high-level APIs automatically
respect user preferences.  So, for example, if you're generating dynamic
content via a VBScript program, it's easy provided you stick to VBScript's
high-level date format functions when you pump out a date:  you can't not
respect the user's date format preferences then.  See the links I posted
just before this to see how a server can suck down the user's preferences,
at least to a first approximation (the default formats for the user's
primary language).