[kinematicgps99]

Also, the US military used/uses DDMMMYYYY format, i.e., 15JAN2025, where MMM is the month abbreviation, which is similar to one of the formats used in Romania. This has the benefits of unambiguous parsing and no need for component separators but lacks lexicographical sort-ability like ISO 8601. A format like YYYYMMMDD might some of the advantages of ISO 8601 by keeping items of the same year and month together at a minimum. (ISO 8601 is the most proper date format though. ;)

[genewitch]

The thing is, lexigraphical sorting is something that can be easily parsed, parse the date and sort it how you want.

The standard was for written and radio communication to be unambiguous.

If you're writing software, believe me you want a format like 13FEB2025 over anything except maybe unix timestamp in UTC.