On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, David Cantrell wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 02:39:49PM -0800, Nick Tonkin wrote: > > Out of a dozen or so responses I received here, on [EMAIL PROTECTED], and > > in c.l.p.m., over 90% were huffy snipes about only Americans using > > MM-DD-YYYY, penned by outraged folks who didn't bother to RTFM ... not > > very helpful at all ... > > OK, how about a huffy snipe that because only Merkans use MM-DD-YYYY, it > shouldn't be the default. I believe that YYYY-MM-DD is in fact the most > common representation (not only is it the ISO standard, it's the Chinese > standard) and therefore *that* should be the default. > > I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that DD-MM-YY is more common than > MM-DD-YY (there are, after all, more people in Europe than in the US) and > so that is more deserving of being the default than MM-DD-YY is. Not to > mention being a great deal more sensible. Furrfu! I thought we got rid > middle-endian systems ages ago! I agree that the default for any variable should be the value that is most widespread. However I do not believe that the fact that there are more "people" in China or Europe or whatever should dictate widespreadness. In this situation, surely it should be based on how many programmers are going to use a given piece of code. If that were the criterion, perhaps the American date format should be the default. Nevertheless, in order to smooth the ruffled feathers of (my fellow) Brits and other Euros, I shall change my module so that it is required to provide a format specification. I only have 'us' and 'eu' at this point: I suppose 'iso' would be redundant since that's how MySQL handles dates. Left undiscussed amid all the furor over ethnocentrism was the fact that the module offers error checking as well, which is nice when using MySQL since, if you supply an invalid date to it, MySQL fails silently and inserts "0000-00-00". I'll change the code as described and update the source and docs at http://www.tonkinresolutions.com/software/perl/Date/MySQL/index.html - nick
