>>I still don't see how is 02:03:13 PM more readable than 14:03:13 - both are sets of numbers, but the first one has an ambiguous piece which needs an additional qualifier to disambiguate it, and that one is detached, at the opposite end of the string. In my book, that's less readable. More traditional and habitual, yes, but I wouldn't go so far to call it more readable.
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>In my book, better readability leads to better comprehension. An American typically sees 2:05 PM as one phrase and has to make no mental transformation to get the exact meaning.
But he does. He sees the number first, then the extra characters, and then decides what does the number mean. It's just that he's so used to it that he doesn't even have to think. The process being blazingly fast doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
> The same person sees 14:05 and needs to perform the arithmetic to convert it to a comprehensible time reference.
And another person sees 14:05 and doesn't have to do a thing, but seeing 2:05 PM has to see 2 and then add 12 because of "PM", or not, if "AM". It's all relative, my dear Albert.
>It's not that the 12 hour clock is more traditional. It's that the 24 hour clock is used in only a few specialized instances.
That's locally. It's only that am/pm has become traditional in the last hundred years or so in the US. I have seen old printouts from XIX century where there was a mix of am/pm and 24h format on various posters or announcement, i.e. the am/pm wasn't as ubiquitous. Also, in Europe, any public digital clock - on railway/bus stations, airports, squares, will be 24 h in most of the cases. So it's just the US (don't know about Canada) where this tends to be the norm and restricted to the hundreds-as-sixties institutions.
IOW, it is more traditional in the last 100 years in civilian life in the US. For the rest of the world, YMMV.
> I would go so far as to say that a piece of software designed for a typical American user and presenting time in a 24 hour format is significantly less readble than the same software for the same user displaying times in a 12 hour format.
Yes. I've had a case where I had to rework a report to conform to that format, because the regular users (golfers, for that matter) were completely lost and complained a lot. But that's from people who think that if a yard has three feet, and each foot has twelve inches, and each stone has fourteen pounds, and each ton has 2240 pounds, then it's logical that a pound has 16 ounces. Of course they won't have a problem with a split day.
