Tech: Date format

Subject: Tech: Date format
From: Pappy Fiddle
Date: 24 Apr 26 - 08:26 PM

In the years leading up to 2000 (some here weren't born yet) it was realized that a lot of the world's computers would choke, they weren't programmed to handle years past 1999. As part of the scramble to fix this, it was realized that year formats like 04/02/07 were ambiguous. Which is the month, which is the day? The solution to that: rather than try to get everyone to adopt a certain order like day/month/year, people should just put the year in 4 digits, the month in letters.

I recommend that the date format here be changed to show 4 digit years.

Subject: RE: Tech: Date format
From: Howard Kaplan
Date: 24 Apr 26 - 09:28 PM

I agree, but we need to go further.

In the US, 3/4/1948 would be March 4.

In Canada, 3/4/1948 could be either March 4 or April 3, depending on whether one is using Canadian (also UK) style or US style dates -- they're both fairly common.

4 Mar 2026 is unambiguous: the 4-digit part can be only a year, and the alphabetic part can be only a month, so the shorter digital part can be only a day.

Although 2026 03 04 (however punctuated), a strictly numeric YMD format, isn't quite unambiguous, it has the advantage that sorting the strings alphanumerically puts the dates into the proper order (provided one uses leading zeroes before 1-digit numbers). It's also the ISO standard date format. If any country used a YDM format, then YMD would be ambiguous, but the Wikipedia entry List of date formats by country doesn't show any countries using YDM.

Subject: RE: Tech: Date format
From: Joe Offer
Date: 24 Apr 26 - 10:51 PM

For the almost thirty years I've been at Mudcat, I've been trying to standardize the date format in thread titles to dd/mmm/yyyy
Since we have people from all over the world, it was a constant source of confusion.
Today is 24Apr2026, or thereabouts. If you get it confused, I'll assume your permission to change it.

Subject: RE: Tech: Date format
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 25 Apr 26 - 05:36 AM

None of us will be around when 2096 starts getting mixed up with Mudcat's first posts of 1996, so the 'yyyy' format is a non-story. 'yy' will do fine up till then. I agree that the month in letters would be be better

If a logical numeric system is desired then
    'yyyy/mm/dd/hh*/mm/ss'
would seem to be the way to go.


*In 24 hour format

DC