I Have Always Wondered,

about how different counties write their dates,

and now I need wonder no more as with this handy map I can see how the date should be written, how you write the date depends on where you live, most of the countries of the world write it day first, then month, then year, or dd/mm/yyyy, a few places put the year first, which is what computer programmers would prefer, and please don’t abbreviate the year, in the U.S. the month is written first, but even more than the U.S., there is one country whose date-keeping stands out, Canada, it accepts all types of date formats, from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver—you can pretty much write the date however you like, no holds barred, this obviously raises questions: how does this make sense? Do people really have no standard way of noting the days? well all of this might change as in 1988 the International Standards Organization (ISO) came up with a 33-page document describing a standard called 'ISO 8601', that states that the international standard for dates is yyyy-mm-dd, from 1988 onwards, all international bank transfers were done with ISO 8601 international dates, so it looks like the rest of the world will have to follow Chinas lead and adopt the ISO 8601 standard, I wonder how long that will take?