Slamlander wrote:
<trivia>Did you know that in the EU the date format string is DD/MM/YYYY and not MM/DD/YYYY, like it is in the States? That's why NATO uses ddMMMyyy, as in 20Dec2006 or the old form 20Dec06.</trivia>
I'm fond of ISO 8601 standard myself, as in YYYY-MM-DD, e.g. 2006-12-20. I've heard a number of Europeans (and others) wonder why the hell Americans put the day after the month in their dates - but I instead ask why the hell everybody puts the year afterwards. Makes much more sense to start with the most significant figure and then get more specific. Makes sorting easier, and it's already how we format our times (i.e. hh:mm:ss), and file paths (~/files/stuff/mydoc.txt), numbers (two thousand seven-hundred ten, or 2710) and so on. The only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are domain names ("forums.khym.com" instead of "com.khym.forums"), Western personal names ("Forrest Cameranesi" instead of "Cameranesi Forrest"), and postal addresses ("Goleta, CA, USA" instead of "USA CA Goleta").
Though I can see why for purposes of brevity you might want to do it the other way around, so you can say "It happened at quarter past" if there's enough context to know what hour you're talking about, "quarter past noon" if not but you still know what day it is, "quarter past noon on the 13th" if you only know the month, "quarter past noon on the 13th of May" if you only know the year, and so on. Though even then, our numbers are still reversed; the most significant digit goes on the left. So it makes sense that strings of numbers like years, months, and days would be ordered the same way, from most significant to least.