In a move that could confuse people further, the United States date formatting committee has decided to change the format of the ‘Date’ field yet again. According to the ISO standards, the format for date is YYYY-MM-DD. This has a logical numbering scheme for a person who thinks in terms of straight lines. First the year, then the month, then the date. Some cleverer people of the world have changed this format to DD-MM-YYYY citing that quickly remembering DD is more important than the month, which in turn, is more important than the year.
However, the United states uses a different format. MM-DD-YYYY. “This was a really silly move back then. As you can see, we have neither put the least used number in the beginning, nor the most frequently needed one first”, said a representative of www.time.gov. If the words of the chairman of timekeeping, USA, are to be believed, the United states will soon have a new format for the date: MY-YD-YDMY. “This will challenge the thinking of the common man and help people think out of the box. This will push computer scientists to deal with changes and make it more complex to manage dates in databases. Changing to this format could be more challenging than the Y2K problem. It is all for technology. We push the limits “, the chairman said. It can also be noted that the US uses different metrics when compared to the rest of the world, like pounds instead of Kg, miles instead of kilometers and names of specific tribes and races instead of the standard VIBGYOR.
The chairman failed the test to state his birthdate in the new format.
