Hi Alex,

At 2023-04-18T15:33:43+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> On 4/17/23 23:10, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > At 2023-04-17T20:14:42+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> >> What do standards say about formatting dates?
> > 
> > Nothing that I know of.

At 2023-04-18T17:32:01+0000, Lennart Jablonka wrote:
> ISO 8601:2004 (not the newest revision, but the one I found), the
> standard defining the YYYY‐MM‐DD explicitly calls for a “hyphen,”
> stating additionally:
> 
> > In an environment where use is made of a character repertoire based
> > on ISO/IEC 646, “hyphen” and “minus” are both mapped onto
> > “hyphen-minus”.
> 
> This is not the case here.  A hyphen is the character to use; that is,
> an unescaped hyphen-minus in the input.

I thank Lennart for having a standards doc to brandish when I did not.

I'll see if I can scare up a copy of ISO 8601.  It's a shame so many
standards docs are not open-access.

There is only one point I want to further pursue.

> I'm not convinced, because dates are not prose.

A character sequence's status as prose is determined by context, not
content.

who am i

is prose (if somewhat substandard English) in some contexts, and a Unix
shell command in others.

Or it might be part of an e. e. cummings poem.

We cannot solve all of our man page formatting problems with sed, alas.

Regards,
Branden