Re: Demo: Modelling Cost of Travel Paths Between Towns

Lemming wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 13:43:31 -0800, Gene Wirchenko
> <genew_at_mail.ocis.net> wrote:
>
>

>>neo55592_at_hotmail.com (Neo) wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>>>>There is no such time as 24:00 Hrs; read ISO-8601.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>You are correct
>>>>>
>>>>>Really - who read ISO 8601?
>>>>>Section 5.3 (of FDIS for 2000 edition): Time of the Day
>>>>
>>>>LOL. Nice double-catch :-)
>>>
>>>Upon further reflection, while not taking away from the apparent fact
>>>(I haven't verified it) that ISO-8601 mentions the existance of 24:00,
>>>there is no 24th hr in a day and therefore ISO-8601 is wrong! The time
>>>in a day can be described by t, where 0:00 <= t < 24:00, and does not
>>>include 24:00.
>>
>>    It can be, but that does not mean it has to be.  Besides, what
>>day does not have twenty-four hours?

And, once upon a time, I worked on a set of applications where the "reporting month" was defined as the 23rd of one calendar month to the 22nd of the next calendar month. (In this case, the shortest month is March, btw.)

This was a throwback to the days before computer generated reports, and human beings needed about a week to gather all the data, but the bureaucracy would not change the ancient rules for reporting periods because not all the company would cut to the new system at the same time. So, they kept the old rules.

There was an interesting set of debates about whether to have another field (in addition to date) for "reporting month" (populated at insert time, and thus speed up the report generation) or to compute "reporting month" during report generation. I don't recall what we settled on at the time. Whatever we did, I do recall that there were unhappy folks.

NPL

-- 
"It is impossible to make anything foolproof
because fools are so ingenious"
  - A. Bloch