Thursday, February 14, 2008
Date formats
Pud,
Why do Americans use the date format MM/DD/YYYY, while most everyone else uses DD/MM/YYYY?
It makes more sense to have it in ascending order, no?
Please advise,
Dobo
28 years old
Dublin, Ireland Dobo,
You're on the right track, but the fact is that neither of those formats are optimal. There's only one efficient way to display a date, and that format is: YYYYMMDD.
And notice there are no separators between the years, month and day. When using this format, you don't need em. Just clump the values together like they're a big number, and dates can be easily understood and sorted.
For example, take three dates:
- October 30, 1975 (my birthday)
- September 24, 2004 (when I moved from NYC to San Francisco)
- July 4, 1776 (independence day)
Written as YYYYMMDD, they can be easily sorted as regular numbers:
No other regular date format can be compared, sorted, or understood this easily.
In programming, people often get around inefficient the date/time problem by not using dates or times at all. Instead, programmers go by the number of seconds since "Unix epoch," which is January 1, 1970 (UTC). Not counting leap seconds.
Time should really be counted this way. For example, right now the time is: 1,202,984,940 seconds since epoch.
Rock on,
Pud
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