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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> Says who?

ISO

I feel like this entire thread has been an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that you know an ISO definition. With the carefully constructed adjectives used to describe the definition ("standard technical meaning", "In a technical context") leading inexorably to the "ISO" gotcha.

To save others time, here's the ISO-8601 document which is apparently being referenced: https://dgn.isolutions.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:8601:-1:ed...

"decade" is defined in 3.1.2.22:

decade time scale unit (3.1.1.7) of 10 calendar years (3.1.2.21), beginning with a year whose year number is divisible without remainder by ten Note 1 to entry: Decade is also used to refer to an arbitrary duration (3.1.1.8) of 10 years, however decade is not used as such in this document.

ISO 8601 is the standard technical way to refer to time and has been for ages - I guessed everyone who worked with computers and time would know about it sorry thought it was obvious.

What's not so standard, in my opinion, is that people be required to restrict their use of language to the noted restrictive sense of a definition as used "in [that] document."

Yes, yes, all of the adjectival disclaimers were used to try to align the discussion directly to how words are used "in [that] document." While the document is highly important, there are many technical contexts in which it is completely appropriate to talk about decades without the slightest consideration of how the same term might be used therein.

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