KITCHENER – Local man Dalton Strickland, whose data entry job regularly requires him to read dates off a form and put them into a computer, literally never knows which date is the day and which is the month unless the day is above 12. “Are we using the American MM-DD-YYYY system or the rest of […]
Because he didn't know about ISO8601. The only correct date format, especially in Canada.
ISO8601 is great and all, but even without a common standard, I feel it should either be largest to smallest unit, or smallest to largest. YMD or DMY. Anything else is just asking for misunderstandings.
Leaving aside the problem that you are choosing a date system depending on who is using the dating system and for what purpose, under that condition the most logical would be MM/DD/YYYY, which is truly terrible, so I'm going to politely ignore your argument.
Leaving aside the problem that you are choosing a date system depending on who is using the dating system
I'm choosing one for humans, that'd seem to be the group that uses date systems most. Picking a new datesystem for each purpose would be insane, but also exactly what's happening in computer systems.
under that condition the most logical would be MM/DD/YYYY, which is truly terrible, so I'm going to politely ignore your argument.
I fail to see that conclusion? Why would that be the most logical?
I'm not disagreeing in general, but I need to point out that this is like saying you should write Arabic numerals in order of decreasing powers of 10 because it autosorts on a computer.
It's the reverse. Computers automatically sort Arabic numerals and dates written in decreasing powers because those are the correct formats.