Allow YYMMDD date pattern

[nod5]

The date pattern MUST be either of:
yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy/mm/dd to reference a calendar day
yyyy-mm or yyyy/mm to reference a month period
yyyy to reference a year period
yyyy-Www or yyyy/Www to reference a week period
yyyy-Qq or yyyy/Qq to reference a quarter period

Allow the YYMMDD date pattern (and YY-Www and YYQq)

Reasons:

• Follows the same larger-to-smaller time units rule.
• Shorter (type faster, see less clutter).
• Avoids special characters - or / which require modifier keys to type on some keyboard layouts.

Objection 1: Some may confuse YYMMDD with DDMMYY.

Reply: Not if they read the spec (once YYMMDD is added). The horrible fact that DDMMYY exists in the wild should not force [x]it! into verbosity. A single person user choosing YYMMDD is unlikely to get confused by it. In multi user cases the users are still free to adopt a convention to only use the verbose YYYY patterns.

Objection 2: YYMMDD may cause future issues when year 2100 is closer.

Reply: Not a practical problem for a long time and the required -> prefix should make batch converting old [x]it! data from YYMMDD to YYYY variants easy, if that need arises.

[jotaen]

Cool, thanks for that thorough discussion!

This is actually something that I also thought about, because while e.g. YYYY-MM-DD is clear and intuitive to read, it is also a bit bulky and might be tiring to type.

I think the date format is a tricky decision, because there are so many variations and conventions around the world. On the one hand, it would be terrific to support everyone’s local style (think -> 5th May, but then also: -> 二零二一年十二月二十五号), but on the other hand the rules must be both machine-readable and also easy to memorise.

I’m wondering whether this whole topic could be alleviated through good tooling, such as an editor plugin. For example, the one for Sublime Text has smart-completions: (video recorded at 2022-04-02)

Screen.Recording.2022-04-02.at.10.32.36.mov

[nod5]

there are so many variations and conventions around the world

True, but 5th may is much more dissimilar from the patterns [x]it! currently accepts and breaks the larger-to-smaller time units rule. YYMMDD is the shorthand for the current patterns.

could be alleviated through good tooling

That speeds up input nicely, but still takes up more visual space than YYMMDD.