Sunder[SMTP:sunder@sunder.net]

Guys, let's please change the subject from now on when we are no longer talking about the original issues.

One marketing vp at an old little hole in the wall company used to date things the european way on purpose, so as to look more sophisticated or some nonsense.

Funny how that didn't save the company when the bubble burst.

I've always preferred YYYY.MM.DD, this way you can sort things very easily. If you write the names of the months, it doesn't translate well to other languages, though it may be similar, *AND* more importantly from a geek perspective, if you do a sort, April shows as the 1st month of the year, before January - not good.

If you do the reverse DD.MM.YYYY you can't sort it either since the 1st day of every month shows up 1st. Dumb. Friendly to non-geeks, but dumb.

The worst annoyance I've seen is using Unix time as a timestamp on log dates. It's the most unreadable of all formats. Sorts nicely though, but what a bitch to read. (Unix time being the number of seconds in decimal since 1/1/1970.)

I use YYYYMMDD when automatic sorting may be required, for just that reason. In all others situations, I use DD name_of_month YYYY to disambiguate the format. I grew up in Europe, and moved back to the States after college. I've had long exposure to both formats, and don't automatically assume one or the other. It's gotten worse recently. Since the turn of the century, all three fields are frequently below 13. 04/05/03 or 05/04/03 are very ambiguous. 04/05/2003 is still confusing. 20030405 is good for computers 5 April 2003 is unambiguous. Peter Trei