Re: SQL Newbie Question about Dates

Dennis,

Without doing any kind of judgment relative to date formats, in the company
I work for they have implemented SAP (Severe A.. Pain) and they use dates in
the *EUR format (dd.mm.yyyy). For once, I have become quite attached to the
idea of using periods as a date separator, as they seem to make date columns
appear a lot less cluttered in printed reports.

Best Regards,

Luis Rodriguez
IBM Certified Systems Expert — eServer i5 iSeries

( Simon: (Off-Topic) Just curious: Which fictitious deity? )
--



On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 7:18 AM, Simon Coulter <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

On 28/07/2010, at 7:02 PM, Dennis Lovelady wrote:

... and you would argue that dd.mm.yyyy makes more sense, Simon?
Actually,
I know you would; I've seen your postings that say so.

Then why expect me to explain it to you again?

Pray, will you
please sell us "dumb" Americans (or at least this one) on the
virtues of
that format? While I agree to a point that mm/dd/yyyy doesn't make
much
sense I don't get how dd/mm/yyyy does.

I should just leave this alone but I'm in a curmudgeonly mood so it's
simple. The only sensible 'numeric' date format is yyyy-mm-dd (with or
without separators of any kind). Neither mm/dd/yyyyy or dd/mm/yyyy is
particularly good but dd/mm/yyyy at least has some inherent logic:
28th day of the 7th month of the 2010th year since some arbitrary
point in time that is the supposed birth date of the son of a
fictitious deity.

The sequence indicates a hierarchy: days belong to months which belong
to years, The hierarchy is obviously better when reversed (years
contain months which contain days) but either way has a logic to it
that is not present in mm/dd/yyyy.

The only way mm/dd/yyyy makes sense is when the month component is
converted from a number to a name and pronounced as such.
Interestingly, this seems to be the way most Americans use it: June
2nd, March 5th. In other parts of the world it is quite common to say
1st of the 6th, 1st of June, 5th of March, or 5th of the 3rd, I wonder
whether the preferred numeric format follows from the speaking of
dates or whether the speaking follows the format? I suspect the former
since words are more commonly used than numbers.

Textual date formats can be written in a variety of ways and still
make logical sense:
1st January, 1999
February 2nd, 2001
etc.

but 2010, March 5th is kinda stupid so even here one must apply a
reasonableness test. So 1st Jan and Feb 2nd are reasonable, 23/02/1998
and 31/12/2000 are reasonable. 02/23/1998 and 12/31/2000 are not
reasonable.

Still, like much of language, reasonableness is of no account to the
users. What's reasonable or even correct is what one is used to or
taught. You are used to one form (mmddyyyy), can see that another is
better (yyymmdd), yet cannot see that a similar form (ddmmyy) is more
sensible than the one you're used to.


Regards,
Simon Coulter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
FlyByNight Software OS/400, i5/OS Technical Specialists

http://www.flybynight.com.au/
Phone: +61 2 6657 8251 Mobile: +61 0411 091 400 /"\
Fax: +61 2 6657 8251 \ /
X
ASCII Ribbon campaign against HTML E-Mail / \
--------------------------------------------------------------------



--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.