Joe Celko's Data, Measurements and Standards in SQL

Chapter 7. Dates

Until fairly recently, nobody agreed on the proper display format for dates. Every nation seems to have its own commercial conventions. Most of us know that Americans put the month before the day and the British do the reverse, but do you know any other national conventions? National date formats may be confusing when used in an international environment. Slashes, dashes, dots, or spaces can separate the three fields. The order of the fields varies and sometimes the year is two digits or four digits.

Of course, the names of the months and time zones disagree across language, so we prefer numbers and not full words or abbreviations. At one time, NATO tried to use Roman numerals for the month to avoid language problems among treaty ...