Re: Date formats

Simon,
I think you hit the nail on the head. I would suspect that the reason why
the US uses MMDDYYYY is because we say it as.. December 15th, 2009. So
people here write their dates 12/15/2009 because that is how they say it
in their heads. It then translated over into the computer world where
these dates must now be stored.

Does the rest of the world say 15th December, 2009?


Thanks
Bryce Martin
Programmer/Analyst I
570-546-4777



Simon Coulter <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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12/15/2009 02:31 PM
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Re: Date formats







On 15/12/2009, at 11:53 PM, Glenn Hopwood wrote:

If you use numeric fields for your dates I think mmddyy has a more
'natural' sort then ddmmyy.

Only true within a given year. As soon as your dates span multiple
years any so-called sort using MMDDYY is messed up (unless you WANT to
group the same months together). Of course, DDMMYY is effectively
unsortable anyway so I suppose there's a weird logic that MMDDYY is
somehow better than DDMMYY.

The only sensible numeric date formats for a database field is
YYYYMMDD, CYYMMDD if you're strapped for space), or a day number from
a given reference point (hopefully further back than 1900-01-01).

With the database using a Scaliger number to represent dates the
visual format no longer matters as much although I think database date
fields should be *ISO. Convert them for display or print purposes.

I never understood why MMDDYY became so popular in the US. That
sequence of month number, day number, and year only makes sense when
written in text form (e.g., November 11, 1918) or when spoken (e.g,
August Fourteenth, Nineteen Forty Five). Even so, to many of us in the
rest of the world that's still an odd format and the day of the month
of the year (e.g., 2nd September, 1945) is more natural.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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