Date fails on dd/mm/yyyy

[Bret Busby]

On 29/1/24 06:53, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Sun, 2024-01-28 at 10:59 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
>> Does anyone know if the date(1) utility will ever be updated to
>> accept a date in non-American dd/mm/yyyy order.
> 
> Probably not. The reason is simple: ??/??/YYYY is ambiguous for many,
> many days. Is 12/06/2024 in December or June?
> 
> So to do it without more information (a filter or format string) is
> impossible - one or the other has to be the default. About the closest
> you could get, maybe, would be to have the date utility honour the
> localisation settings or have a configuration file for the date
> utility. Either of these would be a huge change to a venerable and
> extremely widely used program.
> 
> Generally speaking people want a date utility to be entirely
> deterministic within itself, so having the "wrong default" is the
> lesser of two evils.
> S
The big problem is that, whilst the ISO standard (YYYY-MM-DD) is an 
international standard, and, logical, due to the isolationist nature of 
the USA and the intent of the USA legislatures to cause international 
confusion, the USA refuses to adopt international standards and logic, 
instead, imposing illogical USA standards, such as MM/DD/YYYY, and, 
whilst the international non-ISO standard, (DD/MM/YYYY) being kind of 
the ISO standard in reverse, is more logical than the USA abomination, 
because it is logical, the USA will not accept that, either. It is the 
USA policy of conflict for the sake of conflict.

....
Bret Busby
Armadale
Western Australia
(UTC+0800)
.................