Salem

Scilly_guy wrote:A word on date formats, there are three commonly used formats and they should be distinguished by the delimiter. For example:
12/13/14 is the 13th of December 2014 (American)
12-13-14 is the 12th of some imaginary month 2014 (European)
12.13.14 is the 14th of some imaginary month 2012 (Asian)
Although in these examples I have omitted the 2000 to exaggerate the confusion that can be caused, the year should be YYYY to avoid such confusion.

you need to get your information right. In the US, 13 Dec 2014, 12-13-14, 12/13/14, and 13/12/2014 can all be used, and often are. It depends on where you work or grew up, mostly. Two or four digit years are used interchangeably (four digit pretty much only for official documents that will exist for more than a handful of years). Using forward slashes has become most common, however I work in retail and food service mostly and still see people write dates both dashed and slashed. We're not talking about the metric system here, but about written language, especially English.

loftar wrote:Or you just use the ISO format, 2014-12-13, and there will be no ambiguity whatsoever.

We need to get everyone to adopt the metric system first.

Actually the American system is used because it is said to be easier to class information.
The month first because it is the most relevant in many fields of work, then the date for clarification and then finally the year because most of the time your only interested in the current or previous year.
The European system is used because it is the most logical, date then month then year.
The Asian system is... wtf is that even a real thing? Why?

Anyway could we have an ETA using any of the standard time system for when the server will be back online? Would be great thanks!

Argentis wrote:The European system is used because it is the most logical, date then month then year.
The Asian system is... wtf is that even a real thing? Why?

The only difference between what you call the "European" system and the Asian system is that it's little vs. big endian.

To be fair, though, the least ambiguous of all would be to simply write "13 Dec 2014". There is literally no room for ambiguity in that format, no matter which order you put the components in.

Agreed but numbers are easier to handle by computers than letters no? i guess letter can be converted into numbers anw but I agree that your proposition would make for easier classification and research. You can just Ctrl+f Dec to get all the stuff from December rather ctrl+f 12 and get both every 12th of every month and December.

Argentis wrote:Agreed but numbers are easier to handle by computers than letters no?

No, not really when you're talking data entry. It all gets parsed the same way. There's just less error when hitting "12" instead of "dec," not to mention it's much faster to enter two digits on a 10-key than 3 characters on a keyboard.

Oh also just thought of something else. In other languagues December isn't spelled Decembre. In French it's Decembre for example which in that case works. But in other languages people would be like what the hell is Dec?

this whole discussion started because of human interpretations, not computer ones.

Argentis wrote:Agreed but numbers are easier to handle by computers than letters no?

Sure, but there are no computers interpreting this particular date information. :)

Argentis wrote:Oh also just thought of something else. In other languagues December isn't spelled Decembre. In French it's Decembre for example which in that case works. But in other languages people would be like what the hell is Dec?

Since we're writing in English here, that wouldn't seem to be a problem. ^^

Oh I completely agree that the delimiter gets changed around all the time, like I said it really only is php::strtotime() that you need to use the right delimiter to tell it which format you are using, but equally you could give that function 'today', 'tomorrow', 'December the 13th', or just about any way of expressing a date. So in that respect I was using computer (specifically php) interpretation. I did also mention that after the 12th day of the month any human being can work out which format you are using, and as its the 13th we won't ever get confused.

I have to say I didn't know that sometimes in the US you used DD/MM/YY, I agree that slashes are most commonly used, its what I use.

As far as the labels I gave them (American, European and Asian), that was 100% me, as Loftar corrected me, the last is the ISO format.

Scilly_guy wrote:A word on date formats, there are three commonly used formats and they should be distinguished by the delimiter. For example:
12/13/14 is the 13th of December 2014 (American)
12-13-14 is the 12th of some imaginary month 2014 (European)
12.13.14 is the 14th of some imaginary month 2012 (Asian)
Although in these examples I have omitted the 2000 to exaggerate the confusion that can be caused, the year should be YYYY to avoid such confusion.

The only format that I have known of being used by Asian is dd/mm/yyyy. I have never heard of yy/mm/dd before. I think the"Asian" system that you pointed out if it exists have to be narrowed a bit.