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I'm American and I have made no secret of my disdain for mm/dd/yy to friends and co-workers and the problems it causes.

In software I always use dates of yyyy/MM/dd or MMM dd, yyyy so there is never ambiguity.

Working for the Navy for 20+ years, I always refer to dates as DAY-MONTH-YEAR, but I write out (or speak) the month to avoid ambiguity. So 26 May 2016, not 26/5/2016 or 5/26/2015. Or in true Naval Message Traffic style, 26MAY16. Be the change you want to see.

I prefer "dd-MMM-yyyy" ("26-May-2016") so that everyone, everywhere understands what you mean. (and before you say "well, everyone who speaks ENGLISH!!..hee hee" Yeah, well, the rest of the page is in English too, ...)

Truth,

James

The major disadvantage is that month names are language sensitive.

As I said, the rest of the page is in English too...

Truth,

James

I usually use yyyy-mm-dd, except when my audience can't figure out simple things. Not only is it efficient to sort by date, but, if I am unsure about the date, I leave off the day (yyyy-mm) very simply, and it is clear that I am using yyyy-mm-dd, because no one that I know of would use yyyy-dd-mm, so the format is always clearly understood. Even computers understand it.

Sadly, if/when Americans start to use YYYY-MM-DD (like my country's actual Canadian Standard) - I suspect some people around the world will start to use YYYY-DD-MM just because they refuse to do anything the way American's do.

peter horwood aka Madman Pierre, VP Development, Asset Pro Solutions Inc.

Actually, a lot of us in business in Canada use YYYY/MM/DD for our business and personal affairs.

Indeed, it is the CSA (Canadian Standard's Association) standard since the 1980's, and almost all government forms etc.., in Canada use YYYY/MM/DD. We started to made the switch in the 1980's due to the upcoming millennium and basically to get rid of all the stupid problems between 9/11/xxxx 11/9/xxxx etc..,

And yes, when our dealings are primarily with Americans, we use mm/dd/yyyy because it is more profitable to do so, and your other reasons for us using the American method are true too.

And yes, most Canadians, if the form doesn't spell it out, use dd/mm/yyyy.

Fortunately, no Canadians are confused when those of us that use yyyy/mm/dd write out a date(Though using yy/mm/dd still causes problems and will until 32/1/1

Unlike what I suspect is 'political comment' in some of the other replies, my following is not: I think it is a tragedy when anyone is killed regardless of their country of origin, religion or skin colour. However, I always had trouble remembering what the most common NON-standard in Canada (my country) was until '9/11'. Because the phrase 9/11 lets me remember that Americans use mm/dd. So now, whenever I'm trying to read a date from a Canadian or American that is not in our CSA format, I just remember '9/11' and then I know which non-standard they are likely using.

>And I don't know how their brains don't explode.

And our brains don't explode because we easily understand both formats (we just have no idea which it is when the day is < 12 and worse when the year is less than 31 AND the day is < 12)

mm/dd/yyyy is the way it is spoken in English: "April 1st, 2051"
dd/mm/yyyy is mathematically logical: "least important to most important"
yyyy/mm/dd is the obvious 'you can't make it confusing'.

And yes I realize if Americans ever changed to yyyy/mm/dd some people somewhere would probably decide to use yyyy/dd/mm just so they don't do it the way the Americans do it. But I suspect/hope rational heads would prevail. I've only once see a company use yyyy/dd/mm and they switched within days of doing that.

peter horwood aka Madman Pierre, VP Development, Asset Pro Solutions Inc.

Quote:
mm/dd/yyyy is the way it is spoken in English: "April 1st, 2051"

Actually, it's the way Americans say it. Apparently, European English speakers would say "The 1st of April, 2051".

Truth,

James

Wouldn't that be the Calends of April?
Suspicious | :suss:

_______________________________________________________________
Ah don't lean on me man, cause you can't afford the ticket

And I'll add another one: Why do companies in the US find it impossible to ship outside the US? It's very odd

I can answer this one. I've been working on an international shipping module for a website for the past several months. FedEx, USPS, etc. have Byzantine rules for international shipping, different for every destination country, and of course, each shipper has their own set of Byzantine rules. Then there are the customs requirements for each country. It's a nightmare!

Da Bomb

I don't use MM/DD/YYYY to be nice, I use it when stupid people hard code the US date format into their application instead of using the region settings, or when the corporate mandated Chrome browser doesn't know that the whole world isn't the USA.

Then I have to convert it.

Officially Canada uses ISO 8601, YYYY-MM-DD. Which some will inevitably abbreviate to the even more vague YY-MM-DD, just to make things a bit worse.

Time is a slippery beast. You think you have it figured out, then stuff like this comes up. I guess that's why we're paid the big $? Smile | :)

Our format matches our language. When someone asks you the date would you tell them 26th May or May 26th?

We have many international customers (I'm in the US). I've been aware of the issue a long time and my tendency is to write the name of the month. Even so, I tend to write either 2016 May 26 or 26 May 2016.

Is anyone aware of ISO 8601, the international standard on date and time? It promotes the YYYY-MM-DD format as well as 24-hour time HH:MM (another thing the US does not use as much as many other countries).

We still have one program running here that I wrote in 1991 for a DOS-based process control. It also logged temperature from different thermistors (fed to an ADC). The log file had a YYMMDD.log style name.

this is meaningless. all should be using seconds since 01 Jan 1970. 1451606400 is clearly the start of this year. And use a floating points for those that need factions of a second.

This[^] is a fascinating test. It takes a fair bit of concentration to count the ball passing. This video is SFW.

This space for rent

An oldie but a goodie.

cheers
Chris Maunder

I got 15.... or maybe 14, 13 or 16.667, I'm not quite sure; the damn gorilla made me lose count.

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

modified 25-May-16 14:52pm.

It started so quick I must have missed the first pass.
And yes I did notice the Gorrila.

I counted 15 and I did see the gorilla. And the letter S by the elevators which just so happens to be my initial. And the white team existed of two guys and a girl. I think the black team had the same composition (checking now and it turns out they have two girls and a guy). Does that mean I'm detailed or that I like gorilla's and the letter S? Smile | :)

Read my (free) ebook Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly.
Visit my blog at Sander's bits - Writing the code you need.
Or read my articles here on CodeProject.

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Regards,
Sander

From the grafitti around the Code Project offices, I'd definitely say you're a gorilla and S kind of guy.

This space for rent

WARNING: NSFW

Here
[^]

If it's not broken, fix it until it is

Quote:
So the following time that you question concerning decreasing on a female

Well, Michael Douglas disagree.
Roll eyes | :rolleyes:

I'd rather be phishing!

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