On 12 February 2013 12:40, Jantje. <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Listers, > > Having the habit of reading dates as dd/mm/yyyy, I would like to tell > Softcopy Reader to show me the dates in that format. The users guide does not > mention anything about this and Google comes up blank. Even a search in the > archives of this estimable list does not bring up an answer. > > So, how do I set European date format in Softcopy Reader?
I am fairly certain that it is not possible. There are two overlapping problems here: 1) IBM ignored a golden opportunity in the 1990s to once and for all fix its ambiguous date formats as part of Y2K remediation. Instead of converting across the board to ISO 8601 formats (essentially yyyy-mm-dd), they introduced gratuitous *new* ambiguous date formats like the mm/dd/yyyy we see in z/OS. Softcopy Reader appears to still use mm/dd/yy format - even further in the past. The opportunity has passed, and it won't be back until Y10K. So sad... 2) Java, and products based on the Java infrastructure such as Eclipse (and Softcopy Reader), suffer from a Broken As Designed "locale" model inherited from the C/UNIX world. This is one case where, much as I hate to admit it, Windows has mostly got it right, and pretty much everyone else has got it wrong. The locale concept bundles a number of attributes of a notional national/geographic/linguistic place together, and makes the user choose one, without the ability to individually specify the components. It is possible to select the subparts of a locale, but almost no software provides the end user with the ability to do so. It's <someone else>'s idea of what group you belong to, and how you should express things like dates, currencies, what day the week starts on, etc. etc. If you disagree with any part of it, you can either look for a locale that is closer to your expectations (but probably will be for some other country and will have some quirks that you don't want), or give up. In the case of Softcopy Reader I don't believe there is anywhere to specify a locale - let alone elements of one. Just possibly there may be an environment variable which allows you to pass in a locale string. My rant for today... Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
