On Sun, 18 Aug 2013 22:44:06 +0100, Richard Smith <richard@ex-parrot.com> wrote: >On 18/08/13 22:06, Graeme Wall wrote: >> On 18/08/2013 20:30, Richard Smith wrote: >>> On 18/08/13 20:24, Graeme Wall wrote: >>> >>>> 1900s plural is the decade, just as 1920s plural is the decade. >>> >>> You may use that convention, but a lot of people do use 1900s to mean >>> the century, so the ambiguity is still there. >> >> Not something I've noticed, usually if you are dealing in centuries you >> refer to the 19th or 20th or whatever. > >That's what I do too. (Though even that is open to a certain degree of >ambiguity -- in the ISO 8601 format for centuries, "19" denotes the 20th >century. Fortunately the ISO 8061 century format is pretty rarely used.) > >> Just goes to show you have to be very careful in making sure your date >> references are unambiguous. > >Absolutely. The whole subject is riddled with ambiguities. Just to >take one other example, does 1 Jan 1700 refer to the day after 31 Dec >1699, or the day after 31 Dec 1700? > Both, it depends on the country; further reference to "old style" or "new style" usually removes the doubt. >I rather suspect my database has a >mixture of styles, even though my convention is to rewrite dates to be >in the former style. > >Richard