"Martin Underwood" wrote in message
...

Yes, I've never understood the logic of the American convention of not
putting the DMY in ascending (or decending) order of significance: either
DMY or YMD. The latter, while much less common, has the advantage that a
date stored as a text string in this format will sort into ascending order
of date.

Since I'm aware of the potential for confusion, I never write a date as
1/2/2005 because I know it could be interpreted as 1 Feb or Jan 2. Instead
I
always write it as 1 Jan 2005 to avoid ambiguity. I suspect that more
Europeans know about the American convention being different (and the need
to avoid ambiguity) than the converse.

Exactly. Working in IT I started to reorganise the company database that I
had inherited into yyyymmdd order in about 1989/1990, with all
displayed/printed dates in the format dd mmm yyyy, long before the whole Y2K
issue had been seriously raised. As a result we had virtually nothing to do
when Y2K arrived!