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Could this be a date in the past that is being subtracted resulting in a negative year? In other words, could the year be a -1?
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This is format dd-MM-uuuu, where the year may be negative: -1 here, as opposed to yyyy.
Maybe a hotel reservation in Bethlehem.
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Sander Rossel wrote: (for Americans, that's the logical order of day-month--year).
That's the typical Eurocentric ass-backwards mindset.
YYYYMMDD, with whatever delimiters float you boat.
As for the US Vernacular, most conversations would say something like October 25th or June 2nd. The year is only necessary, in conversations, a fraction of the time. So - the dates are written as they are said. But, as far as it goes, it's no worse for sorting (even when numeric) than the crappy Euro-convention. At least, if all in the same year, the US convention MM-DD would sort correctly (small consolation).
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Usually, Americans consider every single NIH standard "crappy". If an ISO standard does not exactly and without modifications specify established US traditions and conventions down to the last detail, then the standard is not invented here, and is crappy. ISO standards are great if they state that the way Americans always have done it is The Right Way to do it. Otherwise: Forget ISO standards!
ISO 8601[^] has been rapidly growing as The date format in all formal and technical application. It has not taken completely over yet, but every year you see increased usage, in all sorts of paper and electronic forms, in automatically formatted printouts etc. The yyyy-mm-dd format is consistent, all details of the format is strictly defined, and the textual representation can be sorted correctly as text. (8601 convers time as well as dates.)
In informal speech, we still say "twentysecond of October, 2018", we never say "October twentysecond, 2018". Funny enough: When I talk with native English speakers, they use the "twentysecond of October" form more often than "October twentysecond" in their speech, but they all insist on writing "Oct. 22nd". I guess that Europeans will continue to say it the same way as before, that is the most common way for English speakers, but just like the English speakers, we will gradually change to use the ISO 8601 even when writing with a quill, because that is what we see every day where dates are formatted (or consumed) by a computer. Most information today is.
For the discussion about which is the "natural" order - from smaller to larger, or larger to smaller (forget the mixed-order alternative!): Isn't it funny that for DNS names, smaller to larger is "natural", but for IP addresses, larger to smaller is "natural".
Also: Our numerals are Arabic, and we write the digits in the same order in Latin based scripts as the Arabs do - but we read them in the opposite order! In Arabic, "24 blackbirds" (or "sdribkcalb 24" if you like) is read like "four-and-twenty blackbirds" (or German: "vierundzwanzig Amseln"). The right-to-left reading of numbers is gradually disappearing; it was far more common earlier. Nowadays, left-to-right reading is the standard in both English, Norwegian, Swedish and several other European languages that earlier used the Arabic / German reading order.
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W∴ Balboos wrote: YYYYMMDD
But the year is probably the digit you're LEAST interested in...
Sorting is only an issue when you're using strings as dates, which you shouldn't, as all languages I know sort dates correctly 
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Sander Rossel wrote: Sorting is only an issue when you're using strings as dates,
Or even an 8-digit int. But that's besides the point.
The pompous overbearing Euro-gang, demanding everyone adopt their standards. The demands are no less significant then demanding we all speak the official ISO stipulated language. I could come up with ever so many reasons to justify the US standard, like if one were starting a sentence, one would not have to use a digit, or spell out the day. But WTF's the difference. Except for computer sorts where a date object is not the target, it comes do to arbitrary human customs. Lunar calendars exist too.
Not a jab at you, but I'm glad my ancestors left that continent. It seems to be old, tired, and trying to reclaim relevance by force* that it cannot do by inspiration.
* My Parmesan cheese is made in Argentina - and I prefer it that way. My champagne from NY State; &etc
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: The pompous overbearing Euro-gang, demanding everyone adopt their standards.
It seems to me that the only people who do everything differently are United States Americans.
I really couldn't care less how you do it, but having one standard for everything (including language, Esperanto, anyone?) would certainly make our jobs easier!
Getting 195 countries (or more or less, depending on who you ask, we can't even agree on that) to adopt the same standards is a lost cause though.
Maybe for the better, because it's the differences that make us beautiful (except the USA date format, that's just wrong) 
W∴ Balboos wrote: I'm glad my ancestors left that continent
Not a jab at you, but so am I  (you seem to have a deep rooted issues with Europeans, we're generally nice people though)
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Sander Rossel wrote: (you seem to have a deep rooted issues with Europeans, we're generally nice people though)
As individuals, I've often found that to be the case - but when you gather together as a mob, not so much.
The world's common speech is becoming English. By default, actually. Unlike the French, we don't protect the language from outside influences (they're worried because their language is dying). In real life, the international language of science was "Broken English". Not because it's a better language, but because its accepting. Schadenfreude and Putz - excellent additions to any language. So many other fine words that add flavor. So WTF? The door's open.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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The year value -1 should have tipped you off.
If a date value is initialized to all 1 bits, and you interpret it as numeric subfields, 111...11 is -1. So the year comes out as -1. Now for the month, nubered from 0 and upwards, January is month 0. -1 is the month before that, which is December. We go on to the date field: 0 is the first day of the month, and -1 is one day earlier. We were in December, and go one day back: That brings us to November 30th.
Which is the value that you've got. Date -1 of month -1 of year -1 comes out formatted exactly the way you saw it.
I think it would have been more correct if the year was -0002: Like the date -1 pulls the month from December back to November, the month -1 should have pulled the year back to -0002. I read an article about this a few weeks ago (now I pity that I didn't save the URL!) telling that one of the most widespread libraries used for formatting in the *nix world doesn't do that; it gives exactly the value 30-11--0001 for an input of all bits set.
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That's amazing work, Sherlock! 
It never even occurred to me that the year was negative, I just assumed someone mistyped -- instead of -
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I wait for when the relative date format becomes universal.
Past, Now, Future.
The is no value of things that happened in the past. Why waste time on when it was.
Any event in the future either will or will not happen.
When it happens it will be now.
Now is the only time to focus on.
(I have been on a bit of mental self actualisation last weekend)
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You got my vote.
No more time zones, leap years, leap seconds, summer time, etc. 
And the DateTime object could simply be an enum type
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The logic calculations:
Past > Now > Future
Past - Future = Past
Future - Future = Future
Past - Now = Past
Now - Past = Past
Now - Future = Now
Past * 2Now - (Now + Future) - Past = Grandfather-Paradox
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So no more birthday presents and cake for you. Also, you don't get paid for the time you came in for work this morning, after all, all that counts is now... 
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For RTL sorting DD-MM-YYYY makes sense. Not sure about the extra dash.
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Well, that's better than the stupid MM-DD-YYYY, but the only way you can properly sort is YYYY-MM-DDD
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In English yes, but in right-to-left (RTL) languages like Arabic, I think DD-MM-YYYY is the equivalent. Was the language English?
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I am not aware that the way numbers are written (and hence sorted) are different in those languages. AFAIK, multi digit numbers are actually written at least in Arabic left to right still...
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As someone who knows Arabic, you are correct. As someone who has never used an Arabic keyboard for sorting, I would assume that sorting follows the language, which in this case is right to left. So DD-MM-YYYY would sort in the order of 78-56-1234 since the numbers are left to right, but higher precedence from right number to left.
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In any case, why would you sort a date as a string?
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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Is that a serious question?
Obviously lots of lists and tables have date fields, or an entry is tagged by a date, which is represented as text, not as a binary date object. And frequently, you want to order the entries by date.
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Like M#### said, folder names, file names, and many other reasons to sort by date. For RTL languages, DD-MM-YYYY is the only way to do so, just like YYYY-MM-DD is for LTR (with or without hyphens).
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Yes. I take your point. My issue is with a recent employer who insisted on storing dates as integers or strings or even decimals in his database. I can't remember seeing a single DateTime or Date object. See where I'm coming from?
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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My bet is simply on a lazy programmer who got something wrong in using existing data info...
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