Simple cartesian product

[Eugene Goodrich]

If you don't want to be mistaken for an American, you should 1) know
what ISO stands for and 2) never ask whether ISO is a "real standard
in the ANSI sense."  To do the latter is similar to asking whether
Guiness is beer in the "Budweiser" sense.

We Americans shouldn't have too much trouble with YYYY-MM-DD.  In my
neck of the woods, we're used to seeing it always MM/DD (Year assumed)
or MM-DD-YY.  The year rarely makes it to the front, so YYYY-MM-DD is
completely foreign and thus presents a fresh start to actually think
about it, instead of simply whining "it's too much work to change and
do it right."*  The more observant can take a clue anytime in the
second half of each month.

Besides the good reason to use the proper international date format
because that's what most** of the world does, I prefer to use it
because it sorts properly. :)

     -Eugene
* Retort: it costs twice as much to buy two sets of all the tools.
<grr.>
** ('most' has any number of definitions.)


On Thu, 6 Jan 2000 13:29:59 +0100, Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>
 wrote:

>On Thu, Jan 06, 2000 at 11:13:29AM +0100, Thomas Knudsen wrote:
>
>> > Now - you're not going to get that "new millennium"-discussion
>> > started, are you? We are still in the same millennium, century, and
>> > decade as last year. The third millennium starts with 2001.01.01.
>
>> You should, however, use proper ISO8601 syntax and write 2001-01-01
>> This is actually quite important: We really *need* a consistent,
>> global format for numeric date representation. And since we actually
>> have it - *use it!*
>
>So is this YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM ? This creates a lot of confusion
>whenever I need to exchange dates with americans, or with people who think
>_I'm_ american. (the nerve.) Or is ISO8601 a real standard in the
>ANSI sense, and thus claim two different things in different sections of the
>standard, and later claim it's *both* YYYY-MM-DD and YYYY-DD-MM ? :)
>
>History---will-teach-us-nothing-ly y'rs.
>-- 
>Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>
>
>Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!
>

import binascii; print binascii.a2b_base64 ('ZXVnZW5lQGlzb21lZGlhLmNvbQ==')