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by readthenotes1 460 days ago
I usually hold that the only sensible date ordering is

yyyy-mm-dd

So that files sort properly.

I'm happy to see that this enabled pi day, whereas the Europeans would prefer it not exist.

4 comments

> yyyy-mm-dd

> whereas the Europeans would prefer it not exist.

I (a UKian) use YMD ordered formats everywhere possible and have done for many years, a few decades in fact, perhaps even before I know of ISO8601. I've seen more pushback about it from USians than us EUians, for no reason other than it isn't mm/dd/yyyy. In my experience most people outside technical circles on both sides of the big wet are unaware and just use their local legacy format, when EUians see yyyy-mm-dd (or the undecorated yyyymmdd) they tend to get it and accept it (though often keep using what they have always used), where some very vocal USians take a different format existing as a direct comment that their usual format is wrong and feel that as a personal slight rather than technical matter.

The Europeans have 22/7, as long as they write dates with the slash.
It is common in Norway to also write 22.7.
ISO 8601 is the standard date format in a number of European countries, but you do you.
It is? I've only ever seen dd/mm/yyyy or dd/mm/yy as standard date format, with different separators instead of / depending on the country.
It's used in Sweden, at least.

Source: Me, having lived there most of my life.

Second source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Swed...

Thanks, I didn't know that.
It isn't used on any official forms and such that I'm aware of, at least outside technical circles, but people don't tend to have a problem with YMD ordered formats when they are used.
Sweden used YYYY-MM-DD before ISO 8601 was even written, and many other countries use it too.
I know at least some countries further East used it as a matter of course, but I wasn't aware any countries in/near Europe did.
YYYY-MM-DD+Z is pretty much the standard.
File sorting normally isn’t determined by the date format used. You’re probably thinking of other contexts.
Dates in the file names can be sorted by that date if you use the correct date format.

This is common to do.

Right, I thought this was about locale formats and the equivalent of `ls -t`. It didn’t occur to me that the sensicality of using a lexicographic date format in file names might be under contention.