OMG, something worse than SARS!

[Jon P. Inghram]

It's people who write the dates normaly! We all must be fools, both the American month/day/year format AND the European day/month/year format is the worst thing to exist in the history of the universe! At least according to this wierdo that is. It's like saying that a CPU that's little-endian is inherently wrong compared to big-endian, not considering anything else other than that one design feature.

[cjolley]

I agree with him.
chuck

[Jon P. Inghram]

The first time I hear a person actually say the year before they day or month, I'm gonna move it a desert island somewhere.

[Sasq]

Do Not, repeat, Do not come to Japan then.

yyyy-mm-dd is standard format here.

Dan

[KvHagedorn]

Yeah but everything's backwards there, isn't it? That would mean doing the dates yyyy-mm-dd would be the equivalent of our dd-mm-yyyy, so we are back to where we started and all screwed up again.

[Sasq]

quite logical here

addresses read state, suburb, street, number, name. as opposed to the way most westerns think.

Dan

[Brian Ellis]

I agree that yyyy-mm-dd is logical for computer use. The reverse, dd-mm-yyyy is also somewhat logical for ordinary use. What is totally illogical is mm-dd-yyyy. However, I'm happy to see that some of the US Administration does use dd-mm-yyyy (or yy)

Something else that is not logical is placing postcodes (zip nos.) at the end of a line. For a postal worker it is much faster to read and type in CH-1218 Geneva to generate the bar code than to search through Leighton Buzzard, Beds, LU7 8RX, England. It is also easier to automate if the machine is able to know that the postcode is placed at the beginning of the last line of script.

I agree with Dan that there is a certain logic in having addresses written with the general first, narrowing down to the specific, even if it is against current western thinking.

[DukeP]

Heh. This guy sure is longwinded.
But notice his own date of creation on the page:
"2000/09/09 17:21:43 253 Sat"

Now isnt THAT inconsistent? Putting the day after the seconds?
Lol.

As for the postal ZIP codes, I never did understand the British.
In Denmark its straight numbers, and they correspond to an area of the copuntry and the type of recipients (eg: x100 is postal distribution centers, xx01 is PObox etc).

Although the logic does fade, when wieving the completed adress; this is an anacronism from the old days (where mail got distributed 3 times a day! Send a letter in the morning, get a reply at midday sent the order at afternoon). Then mail got sorted (very) locally - and ZIP codes were only used if the mail was nonlocal.

Ah: /rant.

~~DukeP~~

[Rob(QG)]

I agree with him too.

As it stands at the moment it is a nightmare for the European date format - Microsoft software will get it ass over tit at some point.

Case in point: we had a spreadsheet that worked for years - until April 2000, when all of a sudden Excel decided that all dates entered after that were in US format :?

Mind you, if it's gonna change, why not use Stardate format

[az]

I agree completely with Brian

AZ

[cjolley]

mm-dd-yyyy is not at al illogical.
It is simply written the way it is said.
"May twenty sixth two thousand and three"
5-26-2003

The nice thing about puting the year first is that dates then sort naturaly.

chuck

[az]

mm-dd-yyyy is illogical, because your way of saing it is illogical

dd-mm-yyyy is a little more logical (because it's at least hierarchical), yyyy-mm-dd is still the most logical, of course

AZ

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis
What is totally illogical is mm-dd-yyyy.

I agree totaly to that, can drive you crazy

Otherwise I have no ptoblem with either

2003-05-26
or
25-05-2003

but this i dont like:

03-5-26

or

26-5-03

or

2003 may 26

[Tjalfe]

the really annoying part with dates is when they don't specify the format. e.g. old Danish passports ( please tell me they have corrected them by now! ) a freiend of mine on his way home from the states got detained for hours because his passport read something like 03 08 92 .. it was in june and they assumed that his passport had expired.. it was finally resolved when they called the embassy.

[Drizzt]

The logic in dd-mm-yyyy and hh:mm.ss is to give the most "human-sized" information first.

In normal life, seconds are not that much necessary. Minutes are, but only if I know in wich hour I'm in. Hours are more important because we tend to organize life on them.


The same way, we need to know in wich month we are into only 1 time each 30/31 days. And the year, only one time each 365 days. Currently, no one invite a girl to go out for a drink "in three year, July, the 16th"...

Our life is measured in Days and Hours, so they are the first we see when we look at the watch.