• SW (unregistered)

    In the spirit of Cato, every TDWTF should conclude with "mm-dd-yyyy must be destroyed!"

  • (nodebb)

    Attica is not only in Greece, it is in Greece ( 183), too. WTF does the space character between the opening parens and the 1 actually do?

  • (nodebb) in reply to SW

    The United States of America...

    • Only country to use mm-dd-yyyy as its standard date format
    • Only country to persistently resist using ISO units of measurement
    • Inordinately large number of gun deaths and frequency of mass shootings Coincidence? I think not.

    (To whose who would complain "too soon!", when will it ever not be "too soon"? ):

    Addendum 2022-05-27 09:01: Hmmm, the forum software stole my bullets. Oh, the irony.

  • Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; -- (unregistered)

    I can get 50 hours of work done on a Friday by starting my day in Line Islands, Kiribati (UTC+1400) and flying around the world to Howland Island, United States Minor Outlying Islands (UTC-1200). But getting up to 56 hours is a pretty pro move by Stuart.

    (Let's ignore the fact that there aren't suitable airports there and other logistical problems like refueling stops etc.)

  • (nodebb) in reply to SW

    Yes, and "dd-mm-yyyy" should ALSO be destroyed - the only correct date format is "yyyy-mm-dd" (or "yyyy/mm/dd").

  • Sou Eu (unregistered) in reply to Quietust

    Wherever possible in real life, I try to use month name to avoid confusion (27 May 2022 or 1 Jun 2021). I often deal with legal papers from the US and Brazil, so number only formats vary from government to government.

  • Conradus (unregistered) in reply to SW
    <quote> In the spirit of Cato, every TDWTF should conclude with "mm-dd-yyyy must be destroyed!" </quote>

    Only if you promise to bring the figs.

  • Scragar (unregistered) in reply to Sou Eu

    That works great as long as you're not in China or ancient Rome; they use(d) numbers for their months.

    This is also why all forms asking for dates should define the format.

    Date of Birth (dd/mm/yyyy) Is way less likely to get mistakes and should just be a standard everyone uses(not the date format, obviously that should be ISO8601, but the including the format required in the question).

  • Backseat reader (unregistered) in reply to Sou Eu

    Languages don't agree on spelling of month names, or even the character set to be used. I agree that 28-May-2022 look easy on the eyes, but a German user see 28-mai-2022 confusing your parser.

  • Diane B (unregistered)

    YYYYMMDD

  • t (unregistered)

    Just include the part: 29D05M2022Y

  • Tim (unregistered)

    I wonder whether the UPS one (23:59) might be an actual real-life incidence of a theoretical bug I've seen many times - calling now() twice, once to get the date and once to get the time, with the possibility that the date actually changes between the 2 calls

  • Patrick (unregistered)

    And Patrick, are you located in the US? I wonder if the email formatter was using the source locale for both timezone and formatting of the ship date, and the destination locale for both timezone and formatting of delivery date. There's a certain horrible logic to that

    I am in the US, and what you suggest would be better. The source date (dispatch date) is clocked in Europe (hence the 4AM), but formatted as US, while the destination/delivery date (standard transit) is to deliver to me in the US, but formatted as European. Exactly opposite!

  • Drak (unregistered) in reply to t

    Very much like Chinese, I believe.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Sou Eu

    legal papers from the US

    Last time I went to the USA, which was 20 years ago, I had to fill in some immigrations forms because I am a foreigner. The dates on the forms were all in dd/mm/yyyy format. I think the US immigration service was sick and tired of foreigners filling the forms in wrongly and so switched to a sane date format.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Tim

    I wonder whether the UPS one (23:59) might be an actual real-life incidence of a theoretical bug I've seen many times - calling now() twice, once to get the date and once to get the time, with the possibility that the date actually changes between the 2 calls

    I doubt it - firstly because that doesn't explain the 08:59 entry, but also because it doesn't make sense to call now() for an expected delivery date. It's much more likely that the expected delivery date was set at the time of ordering, and merely was not updated when the first part took longer than expected.

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