Re: patch: date formats

[Paul Edwards]

"Martin Renold" <martinxyz@gmx.ch> wrote in message 
news:mailman.6322.1053114038.21513.bug-cvs@gnu.org...
> On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 02:41:30PM -0400, Larry Jones wrote:
> > Please just get used to using the ISO date and time format (YYYY-MM-DD
> > HH:MM:SS TZ) instead.
>
> Hm, OK.
>
> > ambiguity since you can't distinguish between the American MM/DD/YY and
> > the European DD/MM/YY when 01 <= DD <= 12, adding more formats just
> > makes matters worse.
>
> I've not yet heard of DD/MM/YY (ah seems to be british)... we use (in

And Australian.  The American date format going medium,
small, big, another one of these "only in America" things,
drives me nuts.  I can imagine 1% of a country wanting
something like that, but not the whole country not murmuring
a peep, despite the fact that the citizens are all armed to the teeth
supposedly the only way to stop these things being foisted
on them by the government (somehow the rest of the civilized
world manages).

> Switzerland, and in Germany too), as said, DD.MM.YY
>
> OK, I've found a webpage saying that YY.MM.DD is the ANSI format, so the
> confusion is complete.

Larry is correct, YYYY-MM-DD is ISO.  I use it in anything
I do, as you never know if an American may be reading it, in
fact, there's a bloody good chance that 50% of the readers will
be American (e.g. in a newsgroup post).

And there's nothing confusing about YYYY-MM-DD, as no
country has a format of YYYY-DD-MM.  No-one would be
so stupid to go big, small, medium.

BTW, China (People's Glorious Revolutionary Republic)
uses ISO format.  Mao had to slaughter 30 million people
in order to get it adopted, but that was a small price to pay.
With Poets like that, who needs mass murderers?

BFN.  Paul.