From hrubin@snap.stat.purdue.edu Sat Nov 27 17:01:13 1993
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.astro,sci.physics
From: hrubin@snap.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Subject: Date format
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1993 21:00:23 GMT

In article <1993Nov26.153114.23239@ousrvr.oulu.fi> mjl@vttoulu.tko.vtt.fi (Mikko J. Levanto) writes:
>John Hagerman (hagerman@ece.cmu.edu) wrote:
>: In article <19931112.012951.972@almaden.ibm.com>
>: nicho@vnet.IBM.COM (Greg Stewart-Nicholls) writes:
>: > ... weird mm/dd/yy date format .... dates like 01/03/xx cause no end
>: > of confusion.

>: That's why I've taken to writing yy/mm/dd which confuses nobody or
>: everybody, depending on your goal.  Of course, this won't work too
>: well at the turn of the century, so I'll change to use yyyy/mm/dd.



>Both yy/mm/dd and dd/mm/yy are confusing; mm/yy/dd and dd.mm.yy and
>yy-mm-dd are not. The best (IMO) is yyyy-mm-dd.

These are only "not confusing" if you have seen them; I would not be 
surprised if someone produces the same notation in a different order.
Next decade, some of these will be equally confusing.

If we are to keep with general notation for Arabic numerals, angular
measure, and times within a day, it seems clear that it should be
year/month/day/hour/minute/second etc.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@snap.stat.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)  
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