Forum Date Notation

[bjanes]

The what's new banner today reads "The contents of this site were last updated on 13 December, 2011". On checking in Wikipedia (which some would say is not the most authoritative source), I see that the various date formats in wide usage are big endian (year-month-day, going from most to least significant), little endian (day-month-year, going from least to most significant) and middle endian (starting with the month).

Little endian (e.g. 7 December 1941) is used in the majority of countries, and no commas are used; however, some German speaking countries would format the date as  "7. December 1941". Middle endian is the predominant format used in the USA, and a comma is used after the day (e.g December 7, 1941). The ISO 8601 international standard uses big endian, and additionally uses leading zeros, for example, 1941-12-07. Contrary to widespread belief, the US Military now uses big endian for most of its documents, not little endian. Canada (the home of our host) appears unique in that it democratically uses all three formats. However, the use of a comma in little endian is nonstandard.

Bill

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

In UNIX programming circles this kind of issue was known as the "NUXI" problem. Perhaps LuLa's version is an example of the "NUX,I" problem.

[dreed]

The single biggest advantage of YYYY-MM-DD is that it naturally sorts correctly when fed into a computer. That America puts the day in the middle is just weird, but then maybe that isn't such a strange way to describe the country. After all, they're still using imperial measures, not the more modern metric system.

[Jeremy Roussak]

The single biggest advantage of YYYY-MM-DD is that it naturally sorts correctly when fed into a computer. That America puts the day in the middle is just weird, but then maybe that isn't such a strange way to describe the country. After all, they're still using imperial measures, not the more modern metric system.

That's its only advantage. It's used nowhere outside computing. It's hard to understand. Nobody - but nobody - when asked "what's the date?" says "it's twenty-eleven December fourteenth".

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the imperial system. There are those of us who think that giving up shillings and pence was a backward step and everyone knows that a millimetre is a unit which is precisely 25.4 times too small to be of any use.

That said, putting the day in the middle is jolly odd.

Jeremy

[dchew]

I am an American but travel abroad frequently.  I got so fed up with my dates getting confused when I traveled that I converted to DD/MM/YYYY.  But then no one here in the states understood what date I was writing!  So I now write dates as 14 Dec 2011.  No one is confused.  But of course all electronic dates on my file names are big endian for sorting reasons.

And yes, putting the day in the middle is just weird (American for jolly odd).

Dave