"Peter Beale" wrote in message
.. .
In article ,
(CMOT TMPV) wrote:

We can see that from your date format - we make that
7th June. Why do Merkins put it like that? - D/M/Y or
Y/M/D seem a logical progression, M/D/Y doesn't. It's
like quoting a time as 6hrs 40 secs 10 mins.

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.

"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!