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Comment by tonyblundell | Hacker News Reader

Yeah seems obvious, but I don't think it really makes sense to guess that it's a UK format date based on whether one of the numbers is bigger than 12. 4/5/2012 could be 4th May or 5th April and it would be impossible to tell programmatically.

People really need to start using yyyy/mm/dd :-)

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I live in Switzerland; I speak English (and a very slowly increasing amount of German). Switzerland uses DD.MM.YYYY almost exclusively (yes, with dots).

I was filling in a web form using Google Translate. It took me several phone calls and about two weeks to sort out the problems caused when Translate back-converted some (but not all) of the dates that I'd entered into the form from DD.MM.YYYY to MM.DD.YYYY before submitting.

/self rage

dd/mm/yyyy and yyyy/mm/dd are as valid as each other, since it proceeds in either increasing or decreasing unit size. Having dates as mm/dd/yyyy makes about as much logical sense as writing: 10492 as 49210.

It doesn't make sense mathematically because it isn't a mathematical notation, it's linguistic in nature.

In Europe, '4th May' is shortened to 4/5.

In the US, 'May 4th' is shortened to 5/4.

Neither is right, wrong or illogical.

I'm from the UK, but have spent a lot of time working with US based clients/colleagues. They only way I've found to avoid confusion and ambiguity is to use YYYY/MM/DD.

It still makes no sense to have MM/DD/YYYY.

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