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Re: Date formatting.

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On 9/29/25 18:07, Carlos E.R. wrote:
> On 2025-09-29 18:45, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>> On 2025-09-29, John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, 28 Sep 2025 11:15:32 +0100
>>> Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> although I wonder if it's common for USA date order to use
>>>> dashes.
>>>
>>> US date formats normally use a forward slash and MM/DD/YYYY is the more
>>> common ordering (which reflects spoken US English - it's more normal to
>>> say "June 5th" than "the fifth of June.") Dashes get used mostly in a
>>> computing context where software may be prone to barf on encountering
>>> the slash (*nix treating it as a directory separator, Win/DOS as a flag
>>> indicator.) Computing also does see YYYY/MM/DD used instead, since that
>>> ASCII-sorts automagically, but it's not common in any other context.
>>
>> Not for lack of trying.  ISO 8601 is being gently but persistently pushed
>> in a lot of places, and I'm proud to say that I'm doing my bit; all 
>> report
>> programs that I write format dates as yyyy-mm-dd, and so far no user has
>> found it sufficiently objectionable to demand a change.
>>
>> I can still remember the day in 1967 when I realized that year-month-day
>> is the only reasonable date format.  That's probably because I was 
>> already
>> seeing too much ambiguity with things like 4/5/1967 - is it April 5 or
>> May 4?  The answer depends on whether you're in the US or the UK, and
>> if you're in Canada all bets are off.  Better to toss the whole thing
>> out and replace it with an unambiguous standard, i.e. ISO 8601.
>>
>> BTW year-month-day also EBCDIC-sorts, as well as ASCII-sorts. :-)
> 
> As soon as I learned of this iso standard I switched to it. But it is 
> certainly not mandatory as someone claimed angrily in this thread. No 
> manner of mad jumping will make banks switch from the standard they use, 
> which is whatever national standard is in the nation they are, which 
> here is DD/MM/YYYY.
> 
> cer@Telcontar:~> date
> 2025-09-29T19:04:05 CEST
> cer@Telcontar:~>
> 
> I don't like the date-time separator, though.
> 
> 

I like YYYYMMDD too, but the real epiphany moment for me was when I 
realised that all dates should be handled internally UTC, Unix time, 
and that output format, display, is just a user preference.

It is so obvious, and yet I worked on so many systems that messed up 
date conversions/different time zones.

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              Re: Date formatting. rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-09-30 02:08 +0000
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