Re: Decimal time support in 'date'

[Michael Stone]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 05:16:43PM -0800, za3k--- via GNU coreutils General 
Discussion wrote:
> I am interested in adding support for decimal time to 'date', but 
> before I dive into writing a patch, I wanted to ask whether the patch 
> has a chance of being accepted--this may just be too obscure.
>
> In decimal time, 2019-12-12.75 would represent 2019-12-12T18:00:00. 
> Decimal time in the modern era is mainly used in timekeeping (to track 
> employee or contracting hours) and in scientific recording (to make 
> drawing graphs easy). Astronomers use another form of decimal time on 
> their own calendar and would not be supported.

Honestly, this sounds like something that, if implemented in coreutils, 
will leave people years in the future wondering why it was ever done and 
trying to figure out how to to paper over some compatibility issue that 
it has caused. It would help if the proposal came with more specific 
examples, comparisons to other formats showing its advantages, 
references to standards that it follows, etc.