Date convention

[Laurent Rizzotti]

I think the databases or Excel-like softwares have no problems with date format but the confusion exist on boards like ours, where people from various countries use different date format in their queries (or answers).

On this forum using something like '21-Aug-42' seems a good idea to me and I used it for more than a year. As everybody on this forum uses english, it should not be too difficult for us to translate the month.

[Franek Grabowski]

Ahem, Americans insist on instilling democracy where it is not wanted. Perhaps we should check for how many of the participants, the reversed system is a standard and only then to make a democratic decision.

[Russ Fahey]

Franek, Ahem......

Shut Up!

[Christer Engdahl]

A quote from:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Especially authors of Web pages and software engineers who design user interfaces, file formats, and communication protocols should be familiar with ISO 8601.

Christer

[Modeldad]

Franek:

The multitude of Polish-Americans are very comfortable using the "American System". In fact many of them intentionallly came here to take advanbtage of it and the other benefits that we have to offer.

[Richard T. Eger]

Seems we've had this discussion before.

The one suggestion left out of here so far is using the decimal convention, i.e., 5.8.44 = 5 Aug. 1944. Up until recently, I'd never seen someone use this in the U.S. and the person that did I think was just trying to be fancy for effect. As far as I know, the only interpretation for this is as I've shown. The other two standard numerical conventions, 5/8/44 and 05-08-44 can be construed either way.

There is something to be said for the 44-08-05 convention, but it really is an artifact of the computer age. Certainly, you'll find no WW II German document using it, but you will either see the decimal convention or an unambiguous alpha-numeric convention. We may want to stick with one or both of these to be consistent with what we are studying. I tend to use the decimal convention which, incidentally, takes up less space than the alpha-numeric. And, if we are translating a sentence into English, it would make it completely untenable, at least in my mind, to be mixing in a computer-age convention in a WW II document.

Regards,
Richard

[John Beaman]

Interesting discussion and good points. However, my post was not an attempt to resolve the "one correct way" to express dates, but simply a convention that everyone who visits the site could understand.

Regardless of any international stand(s), countries who are trying to culturally take over the world, etc., and what WWII documents show, my point is that with all these possible variations coming in, from new and old visitors alike, it would be much clearer if we all used an alpha-numeric convention. Including the month with the numbers makes it chrystal clear what the month is. So, make it XX-Aug-XX, Aug-XX-XX or XXXX-Aug-XX, but include the month as alpha. This is clear.
Can we all not agree on at least that?