Subject: Date format

From: [email-masked] (Herman Rubin)
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1993 21:00:23 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Mikko J. Levanto) writes:
>John Hagerman ([email-masked]) wrote:
>: In article <[email-masked]>
>: [email-masked] (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
[email-masked] (Internet, bitnet)  
{purdue,pur-ee}!snap.stat!hrubin(UUCP)