19 Apr 95 17:45, Paul Edwards wrote to Bill Grimsley:

PE>> Actually, I've had a better idea, and that's to create a %iso.
PE>> %iso will give you 1995-04-09 for the date shown above.

BG>> Pig's arse, that exactly the sort of bullshit date notation we 
BG>> should all be trying to avoid like the plague.  Fucking Japs and 
BG>> Yanks...

PE> Nope, the Yanks don't use that date format.  Some European 
PE> countries do, and it's the only digital date format that 
PE> leaves no room for confusion.  The ONLY one.  It is the 
PE> international standard, just like English is the international 
PE> language.

English may well be 'the international standard' to some, but that
doesn't make it any less confusing to those not accustomed to it!

Your ISO date is perhaps good in theory, but just because it's not used
anywhere doesn't mean it won't be misread.  IMO, your YYYY-MM-DD format
is no less prone to misuse than YYYY-DD-MM if it is intended for human
consumption.


FWIW, if folks want a human readable abbreviated date format, then ...

  '01-Jan-1995' for January 1st, 1995
  '28-Apr-1995' for April 28th, 1995

should be simple enough for anyone to understand.

If you'd like an abbreviated parsable short-format date that you can
perform simple calculations on, then you could use a format based on the
day of the year and the year itself, ie.

 '001-1995' for January 1st, 1995; day 001 of the year
 '118-1995' for April 28th, 1995; day 118 of the year

Converting this to DD-Mmm-YYYY format should be simple enough provided
you add in the support for both 365-day and 366-day years.

regards
andrew

PS. can anyone explain the date format used in Star Trek?

--- Msgedsq/2 3.04