Having grown up using dd/mm/yy then having to switch to mm/dd/yy so I don't know whether my birthday is 09/06 or 06/09 I'm partial to a ddmmmyy format where mmm is JAN, FEB, ... DEC
Alan -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:ibm-m...@bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of zMan Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 11:25 To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Subject: Date formats How many different date formats are there? There's the hardware timestamp, in two forms (original, with the 2046 rollover, and the extended one -- what is that, a STCKE instruction?). There's something called an "Oracle format date". There's some UNIX format that rolls over in 2034 or some such (tsk, with an epoch of 1970 -- they sure weren't planning ahead!), too. Not to mention yy/mm/dd, mm/dd/yy, dd/mm/yy, with 2- and 4-digit dates, varying separators (or no separators: yyyymmdd et al.), with and without leading zeroes (when there are separators: today as 8/13/2010 vs. 08/13/2010). And of course (the misnamed) Julian format. Rexx has a few others, but they're conveniences, like the number of days this year -- I don't really consider that a date format, though it's useful sometimes. What others are there? I'm working on something that will flexibly handle dates, and while I'm not sure I'll handle every format possible, I'd at least like to make the decision based on a pretty complete set of possible formats. -- zMan -- "I've got a mainframe and I'm not afraid to use it" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
