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Comment by DrTung | Hacker News Reader

Very minor complaint but first of January 1984 is always depicted as '1984.01.01' in the game, regardless of I18N selected. While this is good in Germany, it many countries like US you instead prefer something like '1/1/84'.

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I wish that everyone would switch to the YYYY-MM-DD ISO 8601 standard... It sorts nicely and there would never be any question about whether it's "January 5" or "May 1"!

I think I recall a discussion about this early on, on the thread for the game on TIGSource. I think he asked what would be the best way to write down the date in numerical format without being ambiguous, given that different places swap day and month. I think he ended up using YYYY/MM/DD because when you start with a year, the other two are usually interpreted as month and day. I think he only wanted to use one format, that was way before all of these localization headaches. He probably left it like that after localization because he didn't want to create more problems.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1179/

Being Swedish I totally agree with XKCD since that's how dates are written here since the 70's. But this standard seems to be receding, for example recently the Swedish DMV had to change so that on new driver's licenses the date is written '01.01.1984' instead of previously '1984-01-01' :-( because of EU parliament rules.

Not to mention this gives you free chronological sorting easily, in addition to being a standard.

Nitpick: the example was '1984.01.01' whereas the ISO format is from 1988. The ante-ISO form of representing dates may therefore be intentional, as a game design detail.

1984.01.01 wouldn't be good in Germany either. It'd be 01.01.1984 or (more sane, albeit less used) 1984-01-01 there.

And the US is about the only country in the world where MDY order for date parts is used exclusively. I wouldn't call the US and Belize »many countries« ;-)

I don't have my copy of the game here to check but I remember there being an option in the game settings that let you choose the preferred date format.

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