In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically.
2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667
Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.
Well that's just totally ambiguous. What you should do instead is treat the date as one long number and present its factors, for instance 2⁴⋅11⋅7649⋅15050023, much more practical.
In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically.
2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667
Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.
Well that's just totally ambiguous. What you should do instead is treat the date as one long number and present its factors, for instance 2⁴⋅11⋅7649⋅15050023, much more practical.
I rarely have cause to give people my phone number anymore, but I always like to give it as three billion, 128 million, …
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That's not alphabetically, that's asciibetically. The alphabetical (English) sort would be something like ::--51176632222000
How about just sort the numbers from biggest to smallest?
2026-07-02 16:45 becomes
2026-45-16-06-02
Bonus points for using a very confusing separator... Maybe {?
> Bonus points for using a very confusing separator... Maybe {?
I vote for "end of unit" (ASCII 0x1F).
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Wait, can this format be transformed back to the "normal" format? If so, then it could be kinda viable for some operations... :thinking_emoji:
No, it can't be transformed back because it has lost information.
2025-06 and 2026-05 both have the same digits, for example.
No, it's an unreversible hash function. I use this for passwords - no one will ever be able to figure out what ehntru2 was originally.
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No, because "12".sort_by_digits() == "21".sort_by_digits()
Well it's a NUMBER
https://imgur.com/gallery/phone-numbers-are-not-numbers-defi...
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