dates and their representation

[Caskey L. Dickson]

On Fri, 25 Sep 1998 sen_ml at eccosys.com wrote:

> At around Fri, 25 Sep 1998 10:36:53 +0200,
>  Werner Koch <wk at isil.d.shuttle.de> may have mentioned:
> 
> > Michael Deindl <olmur at dwarf.bb.bawue.de> writes:
> > 
> > > WK> This may get listed as -07-08 or -07-06 depending on the timezone.
> > > 
> > > this is the reason why I usually write the month with its
> > > (abbreviated) name instead of its number: this avois the confusion if
> > > 01-07 is in the middle of winter or in the middle of summer (7th
> > > Januar and 1st July are quite distictive).
> > 
> > I was wrong:  There is no ambiguity when using "yyyy-mm-dd"  this
> > format is not good to read but very easy to understand my machines.
>             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> it didn't take me long to get used to it -- i write almost all of my
> dates in that format now :-)
> 

I believe the yyyy-mm-dd format is also known as 'international' date
format.  For my purposes it has the very nice effect of a text sort
producing date sorted material. 

I don't know of any regional convention that uses the yyyy-dd-mm format
with the '-' separator, I believe that it is customary in the vast
majority of locales to use '/' or '.'.  Perhaps someone more travelled can
provide some perspective.

Does anyone know of an iso standard that attempts to enumerate these?  All
Microsoft and many other applications treat mm/dd/yyyy as being the 'US'
format however I always switch it to the above format for consistency.

C=)

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