Wow. Without any emoticons, I am not sure what the tone is intended to
be, but it reads to me like someone touched a nerve.

For me, the week does very much end on Saturday and start on Sunday, for
what most would call religious reasons. I have always understood the
weekend as referring to both "ends" of the week, but that may just be
me. And I refer to the beginning and end of my work week, if that's what
I mean. There is a world of difference between my work life and my
personal life; I gave up taking work home, since I would never touch it
until I picked it up the next work day as I left for work. For me, that
is the reality of how I do things, for good and valid cultural reasons.
I would like to know why ISO did it any other way.

Nevertheless, I also distinguish between data storage or database design
and data representation or user interface. I am happy to accommodate the
machine in my code, but I want to just whack programmers who would have
a report that printed at the time of your email list in the title
970618113253. As a COBOL programmer, I would use 88s for the relevant
date logic, and avoid referring to numeric literals within the code.
Date logic is such a drag. But I adore standards; I sincerely believe
that we wouldn't have a "year 2000 crisis" if such standards had been
followed.

As for the 3K, HPDAY has 1 as Sunday, but in HP COBOL, ACCEPT identifier
FROM day-of-week has 1 as Monday. Perhaps because the language followed
ISO, but the OS was meant for mere mortals.

>----------
>From:  Steve Dirickson b894 WestWin[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent:  Wednesday, June 18, 1997 11:32 AM
>To:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject:       Re: [HP3000-L] Week Numbers -- A Standard
>
><<I just realized that I do not have a single ISO 8601 compliant calendar
>at the office or the house.  All my calendars show Sunday as the first
>day of the week.  I guess I will either a) shop for ISO compliant
>calendars or b) ignore the standard.  I will ignore the standard.  That
>is probably the ISO 12001 standard answer ;-).>>
>
>
>I'm sure that posts like this are fun to compose (and I mean that quite
>literally-I *am* sure, because I've been guilty of it myself more often
>than I can comfortably count), and the appreciative laughter provides
>enjoyable positive feedback. Unfortunately, such glib commentary tends to
>devalue, if not actively denigrate, the information to which it responds.
>In this case, Wayne's pointer to the ISO standard was interesting and
>useful information of which I was completely unaware. Thanks, Wayne.
>
>In addition, the comment about the lack of ISO-style calendars implies
>that ISO-style time tracking is not used. While we almost universally
>have calendars starting on Sunday (we "Talk the talk") I submit that, in
>fact, 95+% of America does things as Wayne describes, and treats Monday
>as the start of a new week (we don't "Walk the walk"). Consider:
>1) How many people get up on Sunday morning saying "Hey, the start of
>another week!"?
>2) On Thursday, how many people talk about something happening Sunday as
>going on "next week"?
>
>It doesn't happen; Sunday is clearly and unquestionably the last day of
>the weekEND-i.e., the end of the week, not the first day of the week. If
>someone said to you something like "Hey, I'll give you a call early next
>week; say five Sunday afternoon", the probable response would be on the
>order of "Sorry, buddy, 'early next week' starts on Monday-Sunday is the
>weekend."
>
>Instead of "clever" put-downs of information (though not, I assume/hope,
>of the providers of that information) that, while it initially looks odd,
>in fact reflects what actually gets done, we might be better served
>discussing ways to bring the inconsistent part of the system (the
>calendars) into line with the reality of how people actually do things.
>
>Steve
>