[pratik_kanthi]

Oh really? I guess we’ve all been doing it wrong for centuries! Perhaps while we're at it, we should propose a new system where the months come before the days, just to keep our dates in perfect lexicographic order. Who needs tradition and worldwide acceptance, when we could have perfectly sorted dates?

[dannyobrien]

Welp, that's what ISO 8601 is there for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

[mulmen]

> Perhaps while we're at it, we should propose a new system where the months come before the days, just to keep our dates in perfect lexicographic order.

No need. ISO 2014 was recommended in 1971 and issued in 1973.

If you have chosen any other textual representation of date and time for data interchange you are in a very literal sense doing it wrong.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_2014

[tuatoru]

We didn't need sorted dates before we started using unstructured media to store information.

Hand-written accounting journals, day books, have date ordering built into their physical substrate. It didn't matter how dates were given orally (some places: "today is the 23rd of June 1844"; others: "it's June 23, 1844 today"); nor did it matter that this ordering was transcribed onto the paper, using month numbers rather than the names of the months.

Now we do need to sort dates, so let's turn Japanese.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japa...