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

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).