Re: SQL Newbie Question about Dates

Simon,

I've waited two days to respond to this, to avoid a knee-jerk reaction.

There are many responses I could give to your "supposed birth date of the son of a fictitious deity" comment. Personally, I would like to know what you believe, how you came to the conclusion that the "deity" was "fictitious", and why you chose this newsgroup to take a backhanded potshot at a religion that you obviously disagree with.

But the response that seems most appropriate to this group is simply: This is a professional group and using it to snipe at anyone's religion is unacceptable (David, please correct me if I'm wrong). I would have thought that to be beneath you Simon, as I have a great deal of respect for your technical skills, experience and knowledge.

Let's keep the focus of the group where it belongs.


TA






"Simon Coulter" <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:mailman.40562.1280317735.2580.midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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.
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