Infuriated by the 3 page instructions of the Linux date
I decided to write my own.
The worst problem is that there is no canonical date format.
Look at 'man co' option -d . There is a plethora of options
to format the date. It is a day's work to find out whether
they agree.

--------8< ---------------------------------------
WANT TIME&DATE .FORMAT
: doit TIME&DATE "%d /%d /%d -%d :%d :%d" .FORMAT ;
--------8< ---------------------------------------

lina -c sdate.frt

/home/albert/PROJECT/ciforths/ciforth
~/PROJECT/ciforths/ciforth: sdate
2023/10/20-12:56:4~/PROJECT/ciforths/ciforth: dd=`sdate`
~/PROJECT/ciforths/ciforth: echo moments ago the time was $dd
moments ago the time was 2023/10/20-12:56:15

Groetjes Albert
--
Don't praise the day before the evening. One swallow doesn't make spring.
You must not say "hey" before you have crossed the bridge. Don't sell the
hide of the bear until you shot it. Better one bird in the hand than ten in
the air. First gain is a cat spinning. - the Wise from Antrim -

> Infuriated by the 3 page instructions of the Linux date
> I decided to write my own.
> The worst problem is that there is no canonical date format.

There are conventions:

— if you use dots as separator, the date should have DD.MM.YYYY format
— if slashes — the „American” format MM/DD/YYYY
— if dashes — the „international” format: YYYY-MM-DD
— if using Roman digits for the month, the date parts are separated
by spaces and no leading zero for days is used, like this: 9 X 2023

One problem may be with British format:: DD/MM/YYYY — they
also use slashes.

In article <5dd168fa-4461-450d-9cd0-ac1579cea9cfn@googlegroups.com>,
Zbig <zbigniew2011@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Infuriated by the 3 page instructions of the Linux date
>> I decided to write my own.
>> The worst problem is that there is no canonical date format.
>
>There are conventions:
>
>— if you use dots as separator, the date should have DD.MM.YYYY format
>— if slashes — the „American” format MM/DD/YYYY
>— if dashes — the „international” format: YYYY-MM-DD
>— if using Roman digits for the month, the date parts are separated
> by spaces and no leading zero for days is used, like this: 9 X 2023
>
>One problem may be with British format:: DD/MM/YYYY — they
>also use slashes.

The problem is that 'date' wants to accomodate all conventions with a
plethora of options, a lot of more than you mentions here.

So I think you donot appreciate the problem.
For an exercise, using linux 'date'
- find out what options do you need for the American format
- find out what options do you need for the international format.

Not even talking about seconds here.

Groetjes Albert
--
Don't praise the day before the evening. One swallow doesn't make spring.
You must not say "hey" before you have crossed the bridge. Don't sell the
hide of the bear until you shot it. Better one bird in the hand than ten in
the air. First gain is a cat spinning. - the Wise from Antrim -

I didn't mean Linux; I meant what you can use in ciforth
having your own 'date' function working just fine. If I had
to write my own 'date' function I wouldn't care what Linux
„thinks” about that.
…or maybe indeed I didn't get in full what you mean.

On Fri, 20 Oct 2023 06:19:30 -0700 (PDT)
Zbig <zbigniew2011@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Infuriated by the 3 page instructions of the Linux date
> > I decided to write my own.
> > The worst problem is that there is no canonical date format.
>
> There are conventions:
>
> — if you use dots as separator, the date should have DD.MM.YYYY format
> — if slashes — the „American” format MM/DD/YYYY
> — if dashes — the „international” format: YYYY-MM-DD
> — if using Roman digits for the month, the date parts are separated
> by spaces and no leading zero for days is used, like this: 9 X 2023
>
> One problem may be with British format:: DD/MM/YYYY — they
> also use slashes.

YYYY-MM-DD ISO 8601 (EN 28601)

YYYY-MM-DD_hhmm ?

Write the whole thing backwards as we do with most other numbers

Jan Coombs
--