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My personal pet peeve/rant (not related to Public Mobile)..

dabr
Mayor / Maire

So the one thing that irks me a lot (besides the non-sensical daylight savings issue) is the way Canadian governments, businesses and just about anyone else is allowed to format the date.

 

Personally I think it should have been standardized long time ago (my personal preference being DD/MM/YY) just as it is in most of Europe (as far as I'm aware).  I really don't understand why goverments and business use any manner of dating letters, receipts etc.  It can get very confusing when trying to identify older receipts and trying to figure just when a particular transaction was done.

 

I know this is probably not top of mind for most people but I'm hoping government will eventually standardize this across Canada.

 

Thanks for listening to my rant!

11 REPLIES 11

@stonechucker  When I started this thread, I must I admit, I was only thinking from a layperson's perspective.   From your's and @srlawren and @Anonymous responses, I see it's actually a much deeper problem.  So I'm surprised that the tech community hasn't  kicked up more of a fuss for one standard to be adopted. 

 

Kudos to all of you for working through these annoyances!

@srlawren  humour always helps!  Thanks

Oh, this is a problem I deal with almost daily.

 

The computers at work are all set to us (by default) the US Reginal settings for date and time.  So, MM/DD/YY(YY) hh12:mm:ss AM/PM.

 

Due to the work I do, I much prefer YYYY/MM/DD hh24:mm:ss

 

Within a database, and front end GUIs, even that gets confusing as certain software is set to use DD/MM/YY(YY) and the data is stored as MM/DD/YY(YY).

 

Makes for some dramatic differences in reporting when you get the order of characters confused.

srlawren
Retired Oracle / Oracle Retraité

@dabr wrote:

 

So if there is an international standard why is it not being followed I wonder.


@dabr not a direct answer to your question, but whenever topic of standards comes up, I always think of this very-apt XKCD comic:

 

https://xkcd.com/927/


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Anonymous
Not applicable

 @dabr 

My thoughts of the verbal aspect was that one might then write it as one would say it. Thus some confusion even there.

@Anonymous  Yes I understand the outsized influence our southern neighbour holds, but not sure why Canada doesn't just go ahead and adopt the international standard for numeric date usage which seems to be yyyymmdd, after all it shouldn't change anything in our business relationship with them unlike the issue of staying on daylight savings or summer time year round which does require us to be synched with them.   Maybe that will change since EU has decided to make daylight savings, or is it summer time?, permanent starting 2021.  As to how we speak or even write a date, if it includes writing the month, your eg: 6th April or April 6th etc, it shouldn't matter, if either written or verbal, since the month is clearly identified and cannot be confused.  But as @srlawren has pointed out this creates an awful lot of backend rewriting for software and programming protocols so  would be even more reason to maybe standardize.

 

However, I take your point that the US holds most of the cards.  Yes a mess!

Anonymous
Not applicable

@dabr wrote:

 

So if there is an international standard why is it not being followed I wonder.


Because of the heavy influence of that backwater to the south of us.

To add to the possible reasons would be if you were speaking a date, do you say 6th April or do you say April 6th or 6th of April or April the 6th or 6 April or April 6.

I'm partial to y/m/d. Especially now that we're past 2012.

Yeah it's a mess.

@srlawren  No I'm not a software delveloper, but just get frustrated about how the date format seems to change from different business.  It can be confusing when trying to match up receipts if I can't differentiate between day and month (especially the first 12 days/to months).  I believe it's more standardized in Europe.  I can appreciate how crazy it must be for you constantly having to convert when programming if different systems are using their own particular standard. 

 

So if there is an international standard why is it not being followed I wonder.

srlawren
Retired Oracle / Oracle Retraité

There ARE international standards for date format, it's just the not all countries follow them.

 

@dabr are you a software developer by chance?  Speaking as one, dates are amont the very most annoying pieces of data to work with becuase the formattinng requirements vary by programming language, system platform you're building upon, database system storing the data, country, company preferences (the people paying for you to do the coding), other external systems and APIs you may be interacting with (which have their own country issues and company standards and so on totally unrealted to the system you're building/maintaining), and probably several more I'm forgetting off the top of my head.  We are constatntly having to convert between formats behind the scenes and it drives me mad.

 

EDIT: fixed a few typos


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dabr
Mayor / Maire

@Tiprix  Like you said having a set or standardized format when writing dates numerically would really simplify the receipts and letters.  It doesn't seem logical that this hasn't been done to date and its been left to everyone to record it however they see fit.  It definitely seems to be a common practise in North American mostly, although I don't for sure.

Tiprix
Model Citizen / Citoyen Modèle

@dabr what's coincidence, I was talking to a family member about the same thing a few hours ago.  If a set format was set, it could be a lot easier figuring out dates.  Luckily when it comes to expiry dates, some companies actually write out the month, instead of the number value, and reduces the confusion quite a bit.

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