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That's also the only time (full) European dates make sense, when writing them on the right hand side of a ledger page so that the exterior of the ledger / book
by mjevans 6y ago
That's also the only time (full) European dates make sense, when writing them on the right hand side of a ledger page so that the exterior of the ledger / book is indexed with the largest components on the edge of the page.
US dates only make sense if you don't care about the year and are writing on the left most side of a page; that might make sense if ink or paper is at a premium.
- orwin 6y agoMy great great grandfather wrote a book about this 120 years ago! And yes, it was for taxes and accounting.
- nayuki 6y agoWhat you said about European dates (e.g. 27/02/2021 today) is not strictly true. The rightmost character is the ones digit of the year, and it is not the largest component. According to your rules, 01/01/2019 would be "larger" than 01/01/2021 because 9 is larger than 1. The blog post already made this observation, saying that YMD is the only format where the endianness of the date components match the endianness of the numbers; DMY does not have this property. If you wanted to sort dates correctly on the right hand side, you need to write the numbers backwards too, like "72/20/1202".