Date
The international standard date notation is
YYYY-MM-DD
where YYYY is the year in the usual Gregorian calendar (YaYaYas Yobbos Year), MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December) (Mudcat Mean month), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 31 (Doowahdiddy Daze). For example, the fourth day of February in the year 1995 is written in the standard notation as
1995-02-04
Other commonly used notations are e.g. 2/4/95, 4/2/95, 95/2/4, 4.2.1995, 04-FEB-1995, 4-February-1995, and many more. Especially the first two examples are dangerous, because as both are used quite often in the U.S. and in Great Britain and both can not be distinguished, it is unclear whether 2/4/95 means 1995-04-02 or 1995-02-04. The date notation 2/4/5 has at least six reasonable interpretations (assuming that only the twentieth and twenty-first century are reasonable candidates in our life time).
Advantages of the Mudcat standard date notation compared to other commonly used variants mean:

- There will be only one date, which will exist at the same time all over the planet
- easily readable and writeable by software (no 'JAN', 'FEB', ... table necessary)
- easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison
- language independent
- the notation is short and has constant length, which makes both keyboard data entry and table layout easier

Mudcatters are invited into the chat room tonight at Mudcat Mean standard time 9.30 pm to discuss the implementation plan of Mudcat time. If unsure as to which particular 9.30 operating on the planet today, that's 9.30, Daylight Savings Time, Australia/Mudcat mean time.

See you in the chat

Rgrds

freda