h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why do Americans do dates all wrong? Instead of the entirely logical and correct "day/month/year", they use "month/day/year". Is there a reasonable excuse for such wrong-headedness?

I presume Canadians, being easily led, do the same thing, but are there any other countries who do it wrong too?

The American way is more logical in terms of ordering, so long as you use leading zeroes. 0925 (Sep 25th) is numerically before (less than) 1007 (Oct 7th), but in the English rendition 2509 is not numerically before (less than) 0710.

Most computer programmers will use date/time formats like YYYYMMDDHHMISS (example is 20070216091023 for 23 seconds past 10 minutes past 9am on 16th Feb 2007) as this will automatically order time fields numerically.

Incorrect. Not to mention impertinent

In Canada, the preferred useage is dd/mm/yyyy

'Official' documents and such use the ISO standard yyyy/mm/dd

Canadians, being fairly tolerant folk, also understand the USian travesty of mm/dd/yyyy

Sorry Taliesin. No offence intended.

I have nothing against the American date format. When I was 20 I managed to get into all the pubs because my passport seemed to imply that I was 21. Lucky indeed I wasn't born on the 12th of January..

to be fair, most computer programmers will use a variable of type DATE or DATETIME (or equiv) which means that ordering and equivalence is done in date order and alphanumeric order. And then you format the DATE field as appropriate for your output.

Depends on systems but most places I've seen order it according to the local preference - so USA systems use MM/DD/YYYY and UK uses DD/MM/YYYY - although these days there quite a few places that use RR instead of YY (or RRRR instead of YYYY) where RR is post Y2K moving window that assigns the century according to the current date and the entered date. This was a simple fix for Y2K but it does mean that after 2049 you won;t be able to enter a date for 1900's (and 2 digit years for 1900 will be read as 2000 dates).

"means that ordering and equivalence is done in date order and *NOT* alphanumeric order"

slight change to meaning!

Traveller in Time on his head
"I use both, does not really matter as long as you can recognise what locale it is."

Some people say today is "the 16th of February". Some would say it's "February the 16th". Presumably the latter is more common in the US and that's why. Or is that putting the cart before the horse? Perhaps they say "February 16th" because it is written 02/16.

That's the way I interpret it, King Bomba. The spoken order seems to me to come from the written order.

"Why do Americans do dates all wrong? Instead of the entirely logical and correct "day/month/year", they use "month/day/year". Is there a reasonable excuse for such wrong-headedness? "

I wouldn't say it's necessarily wrong-headedness, just a different way of looking at it.

Living in the US all my life, I've never had any problem with either way it's written. I think we just use month, day year, because when you read a calendar, you go from top to bottom. So, in this case, you'd read the month first, then the day, and unless it's the first week in January, the year is pretty easy to remember.

In some cases, we do use the day/month/year format, but it's usually documents you have to file for work. Same goes with the metric system in the United States. We usually use millimeters, liters, grams etc., in science projects because that's the standard for that field. When it comes to cooking and groceries, however, we use pound, cups, gallons, etc. It can be confusing at times, but in my case, I've just learned to adapt when I read dates online.

I always use the format 2007-02-18, because it's the only one that's always unambiguous.

TRiG.

I always write the month to be sure (19 Jan 07)

Traveller in Time comparing datetime
"39127,608287 "

2454150.98292

or

1171843200 (or 45D8E880)

>>I always write the month to be sure (19 Jan 07)<<

Hmmm, yes, because otherwise it could be confused with what's the name of the 19th month?

*smacks B'elana*

you KNOW what I mean...

and you lot can talk anyway, you say all your numbers backwards

Did sales of Porsches drop off in Yankeeland post September 2001??