Re: Proposed POSIX locale changes for fi_FI

[Jyrki Kuoppala]

>I have recently got information from the Finnish standardization
>organization on date formats, and I will compare it with
>that info. Are you aligned with SFS on this issue?

I just checked on the SFS web site (http://www.sfs.fi) on the date
format - in the FAQ they say that their recommendation is to use the
ISO date format YYYY-MM-DD, but "in domestic correspondence" also
d.m.yyyy (without zero-padding) can be used.  The ISO format is not
the natural format used in Finland however, and when some (mostly
official) organizations do use it, lots of people complain about the
strange date format.

The language office of the Research Institute for the Languages of
Finland (http://www.kotus.fi) (who is the guadian of "proper Finnish")
says that d.m.yyyy (without zero-padding) is the recommended format.
According to the language office, zero-padding can be used for clarity
in computers.

On the time format, SFS standard (probably based on some ISO standard)
specifies ":" as the separator.  The common usage however is ".",
which also is the recommendation by the language office.  Zero-padding
of hours is not recommended by the language office, but again they say
that with computers it can be used for clarity.

As can be seen, there's some disagreement between SFS and the language
office.  This is of course natural - SFS as a standards office tries
to standardize formats also internationally, and the language office's
aim is to maintain recommendations for coherent and understandable
Finnish according to common usage.

I would expect there may be also some other variance wrt
"grammatically correct" and "is practical when input into or show on
computers", like the issue of whether to use zero-padding or not.

To summarize, there's some room for interpretation, but I stick to my
patch proposal for using zero-padding in %x, %X, and date default
formats, and "." as date and time separators.

//Jyrki