On Fri, 06 Oct 2000 00:58:32 -0500, Jesper Nørgaard <jnorgard@Prodigy.Net.mx> wrote:
I even disagree about the assumption that yyyy-mm-dd is unambigous, because if the month number and the day-in-month number can be confused, they surely will according to Murphy's law, e.g. some people will create yyyy-dd-mm dates just as surely as they will create mm-dd-yyyy dates.
But the thing is: mm/dd/yy[yy] is in widespread use (US), as is dd/mm/yy[yy] (much of Europe, I'm told). [yy]yy-mm-dd was used in Japan even before the ISO standard came out. But no culture has ever used [yy]yy-dd-mm format, and there is absolutely nothing to recommend it, so there is no reason to expect anyone to adopt it. Yes, the perverse can use that format just to confound us, but in practice one can safely assume that a nnnn-nn-nn date is in yyyy-mm-dd format. As to an unambiguous format, there's always yyyy-jjj (e.g., today (2000-10-06) is 2000-280 --- the 280th day of AD 2000), but this has never caught on in the greater culture (and probably never will). --Ken Pizzini