May be someone on this list has some insight about this topic: A journalist of the Wall Street Journal has contacted me as part of his research for a feature article about date notations. He noted that more and more Americans now start to use the European day, month, year notation instead of the traditional month, day, year, and he now realizes that thanks to ISO 8601 all this is moving into the wrong direction anyway. He would be very interested into any pointers of the history of these three date notations, and actually I am quite interested as well. Why do Americans write dates as "December 31, 1999" while Europeans write "31 December 1999", etc.? Why are in East Asia Bigendian dates more common? Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>