date format

[marnanel]

A Gregorian date encoding I used in a personal system: I think it nicely balances human readability with brevity. It is only well-defined between 2010 and 2039.

Consider the date as a triple (y,m,d) where:
y is the year number AD minus 2010
m is the month number, 1-based
d is the day of the month, 1-based

So today, 1st August 2014, is (4,8,1).

Then define a partial mapping from integers to characters thus:
x=0 to x=9 are represented by the digits 0 to 9
x=10 to x=31 are represented by the lowercase letters a to u

Translate the date triple and concatenate.

Thus today is written 481.

Years outside the given range are written in full, e.g. 1975-01-30 -> 19751t.

Thoughts?

Comments

[treeowl]

Yes, I have a thought: that's utterly incomprehensible. Why would you use that instead of YYYY-MM-DD?

[marnanel]

For other people I wouldn't. But I have a personal filing system, arranged by date, where the filenames include the date. And an ISO date is eight digits, and three characters are easier to type than eight.