Date format

[Dolphyn]

At the risk of being nit-picky, I'll suggest that it would be helpful if the topic dates in the "News" and "Videos & Photos" forums were all in a consistent format. It's confusing to mix the M/D/Y and D/M/Y formats.

Personally I prefer 2010-04-01 or 01 Apr 2010, so that the month is very obvious, but that's just me!

Thanks. :)

[palmer_md]

At the risk of being nit-picky, I'll suggest that it would be helpful if the topic dates in the "News" and "Videos & Photos" forums were all in a consistent format. It's confusing to mix the M/D/Y and D/M/Y formats.

Personally I prefer 2010-04-01 or 01 Apr 2010, so that the month is very obvious, but that's just me!

Thanks. :)

I vote 01-Apr-10

[Ardie3301]

Ever since my early computer days, I've used the 2010-04-01 format, as it was easy to sort dates. I've used it ever since.

The format was/is also understood by others who tend to use a non-USA format for their dates.

-- Ardie

[dfbvt]

I also vote for 04-April-10 in that this format we have been using at my business since - well 04-01-83. Yep! The business just survived another year ( toughest one yet)!!:character00 26:

Dave B

[Matthijs]

That could me my doing as well, because I am very used in using 1/4/10 and sometimes I mix it up to 4/1/10. But I would like to use a format that uses as few symbols as possible so we can use as much space for the title of the article.

[NeilBlanchard]

1 Apr 10 <-- my preference because you don't have to stop an think...

or 1 Apr 2010
or 1 April 2010

[PatQ562]

The shortest date code I am familiar with is 100402, ie, year 10, month 04, day 02. Such a code sorts properly. Not very obvious to the untrained however. I've also seen 040210, which is a little easier to remember (m/d/y) but only sorts well within a given year.

Pat Q

[10.5]

Isn't the date format a user-specific setting? Or am I thinking of phpbb?

[Ardie3301]

The shortest date code I am familiar with is 100402, ie, year 10, month 04, day 02. Such a code sorts properly. Not very obvious to the untrained however. I've also seen 040210, which is a little easier to remember (m/d/y) but only sorts well within a given year.

Pat Q

You are right, but using a 2-digit year only works until you have to worry about people born or houses or cars bought before 2000. So a 4-digit year makes it much more universal.

Back in the "fun" days of the 70's and 80's, many coders stored dates as a numerical value of days from "day 0" (which was defined by the programmer)(Jan 01 1900 as "day 0" was sometimes not far back enough), and then translated whenever it needed to be displayed to human eyes. It was easy to simply add 30 days to determine the next due date, but it got ugly when you had to add entire years because that pesky +1 day for leap years.

Others stored a date as 00-00-00 (without the dashes) so it could be quickly printed. It took a lot longer to calculate days between dates, but sometimes the requirements called for displaying the date more than it did in figuring out new dates. When you store 6 ASCII characters, and you know they are going to be numeric digits, you can even store the data as a numeric value instead of ASCII characters and use fewer bytes. It was important when disk drives cost $10,000.

But when the new Shugart ST-506 5 Megabyte (!) disk drive became available for less than $2,000, I threw caution to the winds and started storing dates as a sortable YYYY-MM-DD format which could be easily printed or sorted. I then stayed up one night and made a 250 year calendar into an array (now known as a table), and a simple lookup would find the proper date (or day of the week). It was not optimal for speed, but I didn't care. Most of the code at the time could take an hour and the customer would still be ecstatic.

So, the format of YYYY-MM-DD, and using fountain pens (they wouldn't kill a 5-1/4" diskette if you wrote on the label when it was already stuck to the diskette, and aren't as barbaric as felt-tip pens) are a couple of holdovers from those wild and crazy days.

-- Ardie

[chijayhawker]

I'm now having to deal with dates that were stored on a mainframe as a Packed Decimal value in differing formats - ie PD3 PD6 PD8 and then trying to convert those back into mmddyyyy format. It's been a nightmare. And this old mainframe would even store a field with just month and day as a packed decimal. Better know the original formula on how to display it properly. Then making into a SAS date format can be fun too. I don't even know the mathematics behind creating a SAS date format, I just know they do it for sorting purposes and it seems to work pretty well.