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Silly question but it is Friday
Message
From
17/03/2014 17:22:03
Dragan Nedeljkovich (Online)
Now officially retired
Zrenjanin, Serbia
 
 
To
17/03/2014 12:28:18
General information
Forum:
Visual FoxPro
Category:
Other
Environment versions
Visual FoxPro:
VFP 9 SP2
OS:
Windows Server 2012
Network:
Windows 2008 Server
Database:
MS SQL Server
Application:
Web
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01596530
Message ID:
01596712
Views:
42
>>>>How do I clear a date field and a datetime field
>>>err ...
>>>
REPLACE dDateTime with {}
>>>
>>>My test was a PM date time. The "{}" cleared the date and time, but replaced "PM" with "AM"
>>
>>AM and PM don't make sense, anyway. Why is 0:00 PM but 12:00 is AM (or vice versa, I wrote it down once because I couldn't memorize it...). The whole thing is as logical as english grammar.
>>
>>The {} will give you 0:00:00... now how it displays is up to your silly calendar with 730 halfdays.
>If I'm not mistaken, AM is "ante meridian" (before midday) and PM is "post meridian" (after midday). Perhaps the confusion does come about partly because 24-hour notation is zero-based, whereas the 12-hour clock tries to avoid the zero and calls it 12. A 24-hour time of 00:00:00 would correspond to 12:00:00AM, while 12:00:00 would correspond to 12:00:00PM.

Which doesn't make sense, does it? How is 0:00 "twelfth hour before the noon", when the next hour is "first hour before the noon"? Or how is 12:00 "twelfth hour after the noon" when it begins zero seconds after that same noon?

IOW, this AM/PM system is badly self-referential, you can't express noon relative to noon. It may look better if it allowed for 0:00 and 12:00 without the suffix. Or if the whole AM/PM was abandoned because of its connotations (ante meridiem, post meridiem) and some indication of "1st halfday" and "2nd halfday" was introduced. Measuring things against noon was perhaps OK when clocks were introduced and life in the dark was limited to perhaps 0,1% of people who had to be awake at night - for the rest the before/after noon division was more than enough.

Nowadays, with instant communications crossing timezones, the am-pm is just a hurdle. Without need for any further thinking, give me the physical reality of 24 hours, I don't need this "I prefer small numbers" complication. So what if in some umpteenth century it was hard to make cogs for twice the precision? Do we still have to pay homage to obsolete hardware today?

back to same old

the first online autobiography, unfinished by design
What, me reckless? I'm full of recks!
Balkans, eh? Count them.
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