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But why would you want to? FSM intended us to use ISO-8601 dates and nothing else. If you disagree, I'll meet you on 18/06/12 at 2:04 to discuss the issue, although you have no way of knowing what date or time that string actually refers to.

We have a perfectly good, unambigious date and time format. It's true that many users are deeply committed to ambiguous formats, but we should at the very least be trying to dissuade them from using them by making ISO formats the default.

I messed up - I meant 2001-02-03 04:05:06 , in which case 2:05PM would be format "4:05PM", (or 16:05) . All that'd happen would be the year and seconds swap order in the "123456" format - but as I said, it's a minor quibble.

12:34:56 2007-08-09 would work equally, though. (EDIT: oops, no.)

How do I cleanly express single digit minutes?

The format string "4 minutes after 12", is unique, but it's not clear that I could turn "34" into "4". Similar for the hour (12 is now 2).

That would also break the "Print this exact time in the format you're currently using" method of creating a compatible time format string.

That's not ISO format though.