in ruby's strftime, why is it that %P is “am/pm” and %p is “AM/PM”

Question

isn't that more confusing? Shouldn't it be the other way around so it's easier to remember?

Answer 1

looking at this cheat sheet: http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/strftime/

It seems that Ruby 1.8 didn't have the %P option before, so I think that when the community chose to add that "feature" in, they chose to use %p for backwards compatibility and added the %P option for users who wanted the lowercase version.

Still, it wouldn't have hurt if they were interchanged to avoid confusion.