Timestamp

[Paul L. Allen]

Greg Vickers writes: 

> Paul L. Allen wrote:

>> It's more complex than that.  Most of the US uses mm/dd/yyyy but the US
>> military uses dd/mm/yyyy.
> 
> God, you're kidding??

Nope.  While trying to find a reference to the US military usage (it's
probably in MIL-STD-00001 or something like that) I found this: <URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date > which shows the situation
is far worse than I thought.  US Federal government often uses dd/mm/yyyy
(and, since the US Military is part of the Federal government you can
deduce that they use it too).  Canada uses BOTH.  Most European countries
use dd/mm/yyyy.  The UK started with dd/mm/yyyy, switched to mm/dd/yyyy
for a while then reverted to dd/mm/yyyy around 1900.  Sweden uses
dd/mm-yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd (the only European country in the list on that
page to use yyyy-mm-dd).  And there are plenty of other oddities,
especially the US military one near the end, where 5102 would be the
102nd day of 2005. 

> Surely that makes things a leetle confusing at times...

Only when soldiers write letters home, I suppose.  It's not much of a
problem if you use the name of the month (or an abbreviation of it).
It's when you see 01/02/03 that you really have problems.  Is that 2001
or 2003?  Which way around are the day and month? 

The ISO format resolves the ambiguities.  Then again, the struct
returned by localtime or gmtime has its members in the opposite order
and that works quite well too. :) 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support 



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