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Comment by jjnoakes | Hacker News Reader

How can 1/5/10 be interpreted as 10 years ago? The only two interpretations I can think of are "January 5, 2010" and "May 1, 2010".

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

Peer into the madness, and quake in fear.

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.

I don't see where 10ya comes from, but DMY, MDY, and YMD, at least, are all plausible interpretations.

YMD is only plausible if the first number is 2-digits or 4-digits. How is "1" a year? Unless we're talking about 1AD...

> 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.

Really? I don't think I've ever seen this, though I guess I don't deal with a lot of handwritten dates.

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").

One of the comments says:

> when I searched on the problem just now, I found complaints about the same problem going back to 2006.

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