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Comment by davidhyde | Hacker News Reader

> You can write # 2001-08-12 # to mean the date 2001-08-12, instead of writing something annoying like Date(2001, 8, 12)

I like this article but oh man dates just trigger me. Such a missed opportunity to use an unambiguous date example like 2001-08-13

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Year-day-month would be a truly cursed assumption for a format

It would have been unambiguous in a world where we all agreed that both months and days start at 0 :)

Also don't forget about year 0 (which doesn't exists and is a single point of failure for so many programs that deal with calculating time between now and a BC date)

If only anything with calendars was that clear-cut. ISO 8601 does have year zero.

> It would have been unambiguous in a world where we all agreed that both months and days start at 0 :)

How so? Would 2021-08-12 mean month 08 or month 12? It doesn't matter if it starts from zero, it still looks ambiguous to me.

Yeah, sure, because normal people count form zero…

Have you actually ever watched people counting things?

In a sane world the offset based counting (zero bases) would have never surface (besides in very specific and seldom circumstances).

Also it's a shame that the C languages started to call offset "index" (and there is not even a proper index operator!).

Oh the joys of being a school administrator with a new international student whose birth date is given as 3/7/5.

You have students who are 1648 years old? :-)

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