Re: ISO8601 nitpicking

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 4:45 AM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On tor, 2012-02-23 at 23:41 -0800, Daniel Farina wrote:
>> As it turns out, evidence would suggests that the "ISO" output in
>> Postgres isn't, unless there's an ISO standard for date and time that
>> is referring to other than 8601.
>
> Yes, ISO 9075, the SQL standard.  This particular issue has been
> discussed many times; see the archives.
>

I did try searching, but this did not come up quickly, except as "the
T is not necessary," as is commonly repeated on the web. The manual is
misleading to me on this admittedly very fine point:

"""
8.5.2. Date/Time Output

The output format of the date/time types can be set to one of the four
styles ISO 8601, SQL (Ingres), traditional POSTGRES (Unix date
format), or German. The default is the ISO format. (The SQL standard
requires the use of the ISO 8601 format. The name of the "SQL" output
format is a historical accident.) Table 8-14 shows examples of each
output style. The output of the date and time types is of course only
the date or time part in accordance with the given examples.

Table 8-14. Date/Time Output Styles

Style Specification Description Example
ISO ISO 8601/SQL standard 1997-12-17 07:37:16-08
"""

If the SQL standard *also*, in fact, refers to ISO 8601 (rather than
defining a format or extension in in ISO 9075), then sans picking a
tiny detail out of the standard I think my point still stands. I
would appreciate an archive link that hashes this out, if it has been
sifted down into oblivion by search technology.

--
fdr