At 07:40 +0000 2000-10-06, ken@halcyon.com wrote:
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).
Slight refinement: dd/mm/[yy]yy. Used in all European countries - and all countries colonized by a European country at one time or another which haven't had a strong US influence since, and probably all remaining Asian, African, and Pacific countries - that don't use [yy]yy-mm-dd. mm/dd/yy[yy] is restricted almost entirely to the US and a few neighbors. I would hesitate to say it is in widespread use.
[yy]yy-mm-dd was used in Japan even before the ISO standard came out.
And in China, and in Sweden, and in Hungary, ... (possibly with different separators). Also in the Arab world, in the sense that the digits (all of them) appear in the same order from left to right, only Arabic is written right to left.
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.
Thanks Ken. You've put it much better and more concisely than I could have. --Alex _______________ Alex LIVINGSTON Macintosh and Lotus Notes Support / Information Technology (IT) Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) UNSW SYDNEY NSW 2052 / Australia Facsimile: +61 2 9931-9349 / Telephone: +61 2 9931-9264 Time : UTC+11---[last Mar. Sun.---UTC+10---[last Aug. Sun.---UTC+11--- At end of today, Wednesday, October 18, time since epoch (1-1-1 at 00:00:00) = 730411 days = 1999.79739488 average Gregorian years time until 3rd millennium, 21st century, 201st decade, 2001st year = 74 days = .20260512 average Gregorian years