Personally, unless I am doing an internal email, I use the ISO date format. There should be no chance of accidental misunderstanding. Of course, some may ask "what weird date is that?" in which case I can explain. On my checks, I use "dd mon yyyy". Again, no confusion and it is intuitively obvious what the date is. I even tend to use that in my internal company correspondence. In files, I use ISO or some binary format, such as STCKE or Lilian. Which confuses the crap out of the COBOL programmers. But I don't really care. I point them to the doc on how to convert Lilian to/from character and tell them to use that LE subroutine. Not that I actually create many files used by programmers.
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 8:47 PM, John Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Ron Hawkins wrote: > > Surely you meant to say "almost all of the rest of the world..." > > I meant something a little more restrictive, to wit the regions that > used to be [and in some measure still are] colo[u]red pink on world > maps. None of my Pakistani friends of course thinks of him/herself as > a living in the British Empire. 1957 was a long time ago. Still, > they all use the British spelling 'colour' instead of the American > spelling 'color'. Language dialects are very conservative. There is > no right or wrong twixt them. There is only what is. > > A few minutes ago I sent an email in German to a German-speaking Swiss > colleague, and I dated it "17.September 2013". In writing to her in > German it would not occur to me to use 17.09 2013 or the like, > although she would of course understand what I meant if I did so > > These things said, it must be conceded that the American construct > > <month><day of month><year> > > is a municipal one, having only local validity, in the sense in which > international lawyers use that term. It does not sort, and it is all > but certain to make trouble sooner rather than later if you use it to > date cheques|checks drawn on British-Commonwealth banks. > > John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code. Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
