I use year/month/day order too (so does ISO) but we all pad out our years to 2 or 4 digits. If the only way to interpret "1/5/10" as 2001 is to assume the form

I use year/month/day order too (so does ISO) but we all pad out our years to 2 or 4 digits. If the only way to interpret "1/5/10" as 2001 is to assume the formatting is hosed, then I guess one could also assume the character encoding was mangled and the bytes for "1" and "5" should perhaps be in a crazy encoding (think ebcdic on steroids) that maps them to "7" and "-2". So I guess assuming the date "1/5/10" could refer to the year 2BC is about as logical as assuming it could refer to 2001? And the 10th of May, 2001, wasn't 10 years ago anyway (not that it is relevant)...