Pretty funny how an ambiguous date format ("1/5/10") led to two interpretations of how long ago this was (6 or 10 years ago).
To clarify: at the time of initially writing this comment, there were only two comments in this thread: the parent of this comment, which said it was 6 years ago; and another, which said it was 10 years ago. I don't know or care whether it was legitimate for either to come to the conclusion they did, I just thought it was funny, and that it was most likely due to the super-short date format inside the link. Can we move on please?
Sorry, I understand that different locales use different orderings, and I scanned that chart, but I still don't see how "1/5/10" could have anything but the "10" refer to the year. Is there a country that uses one-digit years in their dates (unless referring to 1AD or 5AD)?
South Africa use the Year/Month/Day order, and if one assumes these strings were converted to integers and that the conversion implies any number of preceding zeros are ignored, then that could be 10th of May 2001
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)...
My all-time favourite was .NET running in a Thai locale interpreting standard "completely unambiguous" ISO yyyy-MM-dd as a Buddhist calendar year, i.e. Gregorian year + 543. Hilarity ensued.
> YMD is only plausible if the first number is 2-digits or 4-digits. How is "1" a year?
During the first decade of the 21st Century, I regularly encountered dates, especially handwritten, with single digit years, because some people first reduce to a two-digit year when writing dates, but then -- as with any other number -- leave off leading zeros.
The date in question ("1/5/10") was formatted by a computer, so hand-written dates seem pretty far off topic.
But even ignoring that, I've never ever seen a single person write a single-digit year. Not alone ("I graduated in 1" vs "I graduated in 2001"), not in dates ("August 7, 1" vs "August 7, 2001"), not anywhere.
The single digits in the date are not prefixed with a zero. So "1" could be interpreted as 2001. Why would the first digit be prefixed with zero but not the middle digit ("5").
