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Re: Date formatting.

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On 2025-09-29 19:30, Pancho wrote:
> 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.

Oh, yes.

MsDOS did not have initially a way to cope with timezones or locales. 
They had localtime only, and you had to type it at boot. And they had 
different charsets to adapt to several... er... european? languages.

With that inheritance, trying to adapt to multizone and multilanguage, 
it is terrible situation.


-- 
Cheers, Carlos.
ES🇪🇸, EU🇪🇺;

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            Re: Favorite Font Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-09-30 22:46 +0000
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          Re: Favorite Font Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever@dslextreme.com> - 2025-10-04 10:08 -0700
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      Re: Favorite Font John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-09-29 09:11 -0700
        Re: Favorite Font Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2025-09-29 16:45 +0000
          Date formatting. "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-09-29 19:07 +0200
            Re: Date formatting. Pancho <Pancho.Jones@protonmail.com> - 2025-09-29 18:30 +0100
              Re: Date formatting. Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-09-29 19:40 +0000
                Re: Date formatting. "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-09-29 21:52 +0200
              Re: Date formatting. "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-09-29 21:45 +0200
              Re: Date formatting. rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-09-30 02:08 +0000
            Re: Date formatting. c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2025-09-29 23:15 -0400
          Re: Favorite Font rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-09-29 18:55 +0000

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