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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Germany uses DD.MM.YY(YY). Dashes are for weirdos like me, and only for ISO dates, never DD-MM-YYYY.

> Germany uses DD.MM.YY(YY)

And I assume this is the usual one in Europe in general for a human-readable context, like within a sentence. And as you said, dashes only in YYYY-MM-DD which is hopefully used always in any data context.

Never really seen it in several European countries

It's more about the order DD MM YYYY than the separators.

Hard disagree. The separator choice implies different ordering to me and to many others.

Ok what's 2/8/24 in words?

2nd of August, 2024 or Feb 8th, 2024.

Exactly. Choice of the separator '/' doesn't disambiguate.

It does in my jurisdiction. 2/8/24 is usually m/d/y, 2-8-24 is usually d-m-y, 2024-2-8 is always y-m-d.

> It does in my jurisdiction. 2/8/24 is usually m/d/y, 2-8-24 is usually d-m-y

Where is that?

I would guess this is more like 'most people use /' and 'most people where I am use month first'; therefore those using - separation are weirdo Europeans/rest of world putting the day first.

February 8th, 2024 a.k.a. 2024-02-08 a.k.a. 08.02.2024.

In your country maybe, and it narrows it down to approximately one.

two slash eight slash twenty four

I never knew that, actually. I developed a habit of writing my dates with dashes instead of slashes because I thought the latter looked too much like the number 1. Makes me wonder how many people I've confused after they read paperwork I dated. I currently do ISO order with forward-slash as a separator, which might be similarly confusing.

There are systems out there that do YYYY/DD/MM. AFAICT YYYY-DD-MM is only used by evil pranksters, so a date that starts with a 4 digit number and uses dashes is relatively safely assumed as YYYY-MM-DD.

The order is common throughout much of the world.

The separators (especially with that order) are not.

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