date format

MM/DD/YY or MM/DD/YYYY is the US convention. DD/MM/YY or DD/MM/YYYY is more common in the rest of the world. Also the rest of the world is more likely to use 24 hour time, and to order things from least significance to most significance, and vice versa.

I believe the date format is an option in the software of this forum, but doesn't seem to be user selectable.

To avoid confusion we also spell out the day of the week because in some locales, Sunday is the 1st day, and in others Monday is the 1st day of the week. Some other non-roman alphabet (or non greek/cyrillic) countries use numbers to name the days and this adds to a lot of confusion as you can be off a whole day.

 

Yes, the board uses vBulletin and I'm pretty sure there isn't a user selectable date time format. dd/mm/yyyy is an administrative option, but since the large majority of board members are in the US that wouldn't make sense for a board wide format.

 

I have a calendar that 'orders' the months in order: April to September, and the days of the week in order: from Friday to Wednesday.

But other than a novelty, alphabetical order is not a reasonable order for a calender, no matter how sensible it may be in general.

Being Right is not always best.

 

I try to use the official US Computer Date Format wherever possible to avoid confusion, especially across national/cultural boundaries.

20110511 can be read and sorted by any computer program without requiring conversion. For human readability, delimiters can easily be added, e.g. 2011-05-11.

 

Zenmachine, to me 20110511 is the epitome of confusion for anyone who's lived outside the US. If you see a bunch of dates all in a row, like 20110523 right next to it, it's obvious, but otherwise I would say rather disconcerting. Did I accidentally nap for four months? Did my Prius go 88 mph and I went back to the future? These things could really screw with a guy.

 

I use that format when having conversations with a computer. With people, not so much, other than for China, Korea and Japan.

 

Silly humanoids with your base 10 decimal system.

We should express all information in binary and communicate via machine code since that is the language of logic

 

When communicating with humans I add delimiters for clarity, of course! Computers, on the other hand, prefer a single whole number.

This format is a US standard for internal storage of dates in computer databases. I wouldn't be surprised if it was used for this purpose all over the world by developers who prefer simplicity over stupidity.

Back in the eighties I used to write software for banks, and this format is what was used to store dates in the DB. It makes calculations based on dates, e.g. Interest payments, a breeze. It also makes it easy to sort things like user activities (deposits/withdrawals etc.) based on date.

The user interface (DOS based back then) just had to have a few simple reusable functions to output/input the dates in whatever format the human operator is familiar with.

 

0100111010101011010101one!!!

Sorry, I was possessed by an artificially intelligent lifeform.

I wonder what 8-fingered aliens think about base 10. They are probably laughing at us. Octal is obviously superior.

zen, you must have been responsible for y2k. programmers were smarter back then. they knew the code they made in the 80's would also keep them employed in the late 90's.

Going back to hyo's point, I think the pervasive use of 12 is a because it because it is divisible by 6, 4, 3 and 2. This is also why we use 60 seconds, 60 minutes and 360 degrees.

After the French Revolution, they wanted to use decimal time. 10 months, 10 hours, 100 seconds. Now wouldn't that make sense? Too bad they couldn't change the year to 100 days.

 

Speaking of Y2K, I remember doing research on the exact calculations for leap years for the app we wrote back then. It turned out to be more complicated than I thought I knew. This was before the Internet, I had to go to a real library! I even contacted the Census Bureau to get some data from them.

Anyway, as a result, I told my boss that we should expand the range for the year from two digits to four, just in case our program lasts until 2000. He looked at me as if I was crazy, but after some persuasion he relented. Keep in mind that back in those days RAM was a premium. We coded in Pascal, and each program could not exceed 64KB, so every bit counted.

Man, I sure miss those simpler times )

 

Please delete this post

subj. delete this post pls Thnx

 

Please delete this post

subj. delete this post pls Thnx

 

Actually, that would only be confusing to anyone who's lived IN the U.S. - along with those weird unit of measurements you calculate with 10 and only 10, as opposed to the much easier to understand 16, 8, 3, 12, etc.

Also, what's the deal with soccer?