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Martin Underwood · July 7th 05, 12:56 PM posted to uk.transport.london

"Peter Beale" wrote in message
.. .
In article ,
(CMOT TMPV) wrote:

We can see that from your date format - we make that
7th June. Why do Merkins put it like that? - D/M/Y or
Y/M/D seem a logical progression, M/D/Y doesn't. It's
like quoting a time as 6hrs 40 secs 10 mins.

Yes, I've never understood the logic of the American convention of not
putting the DMY in ascending (or decending) order of significance: either
DMY or YMD. The latter, while much less common, has the advantage that a
date stored as a text string in this format will sort into ascending order
of date.

Since I'm aware of the potential for confusion, I never write a date as
1/2/2005 because I know it could be interpreted as 1 Feb or Jan 2. Instead I
always write it as 1 Jan 2005 to avoid ambiguity. I suspect that more
Europeans know about the American convention being different (and the need
to avoid ambiguity) than the converse.