Wouldn't the PC term be middle Native American?

Well, to attribute that to SHARES, we should go with big endian ;)

I love how they write the dates when you hover over the image. XKCD.

ISO all the way. Words have issues for different month languages (e.g. Auot vs. August), but otherwise is more elegant (no delimiter needed, e.g. 08JUL15)

It's called "8. Juli 2015" where I live. Use numbers, please.

Stardate 1673.85

Or you know, 2015-07-08, which is perfectly readable to me.

Except that month starts at 0.

Are the airlines using systems that modern?

I was guessing something a bit more

01 OUTAGE-DATE-DATA.

     05  OUTAGE-DATE.

          10  OUTAGE-YEAR           PIC 9(04).

	  10  OUTAGE-MONTH          PIC 9(02).

	  10  OUTAGE-DAY            PIC 9(02).

     05  OUTAGE-TIME.

	  10  OUTAGE-HOURS          PIC 9(02).

	  10  OUTAGE-MINUTE         PIC 9(02).

	  10  OUTAGE-SECOND         PIC 9(02).

	  10  OUTAGE-MILLISECONDS   PIC 9(02).

     05  OUTAGE-DIFF-FROM-GMT       PIC S9(04).

MOVE FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE TO OUTAGE-DATE-DATA

I always kinda liked the meme from that language of "variable as picture". Calling something a picture has inherent and obvious implications WRT call by value vs call by name.

On the other hand intrinsic functions like FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE are not as logically amusing.

Why is this being down voted? It is true. When British sites spell things with superfluous letters (colour, for instance,) should HN readers demand that they change it to the more efficient spelling? American English is spoken natively by more people in the world than British English, so therefore must we banish British English from these pages? Of course not. We could argue that the US has the largest number of visitors to HN than any other country. HN is an American site. YC is an American organization. Thus, those not comfortable with American conventions really ought to get over it.

The United States has the world's largest economy, according to the IMF, World Bank and UN. So obviously the US is doing something right. Perhaps the rest of the world ought to adopt American conventions. I say that in jest, but the point is that criticizing the American way of doing things is a popular sport, yet at the end of the day, the American system has resulted in an economic output greater than Germany, the UK, France and Italy combined. The EU has a per-capita GDP of $36,779 and the US is at $54,601. So apparently something is working with the American way of doing things. Just because "the rest of the world" does it doesn't make it better. This whole idea that the American way of doing things is somehow inferior is just as ridiculous as the British/French rivalry.

The fact that the parent comment is the top comment is ridiculous. It's a petty thing about which to complain and adds nothing to the discussion. In fact, the parent comment ought to be down voted for being absolutely irrelevant to the posting in question.

But a month from now, some people will be confused for sure. So, it's more future-proof to settle for ISO or alphanumeric format to avoid confusion and miscommunication.