TheStar.com - Is today 23/01/2005 or 2005/01/23?
ISO standard coming up ... 2005-02-01
TheStar.com - Is today 23/01/2005 or 2005/01/23?: "Is today 23/01/2005 or 2005/01/23?"
We can put a man on the moon but we can't agree on what the date is
KENNETH KIDD
FEATURE WRITER
The Canadian Payments Association, central clearing house for the country's financial institutions, says it wants to start processing cheques electronically. No more shuttling five million cheques between various banks every weekday; they'll just scan the little chits into a computer and, voila, consider it cleared.
This will, alas, also mean changes to your everyday life. In the not-too-distant future, you won't be writing out the date in the big round hand Miss Olsen taught you in grade school, as in "January 23, 2005." For cheques to be scanned, the dates will have to be rendered in numbers alone, not a mix of both.
This sounds simple, but the realm of numeric dating — using just numbers to signify dates — is a tossed salad of idiosyncrasies. Consider 01/02/03. That could mean February 1, 2003; or January 2, 2003; or perhaps March 2, 2001. Or something completely different.
So the payments people, after much confabbing and canvassing, have come up with two options. You can use numbers to represent the day, month and year, in that order, or you can do it month, day and year. The cheque will be printed with a legend, such as DD/MM/YY, letting everyone know which style you picked when you ordered your cheques.
"Some of our member financial institutions indicated that their research showed consumers would be more readily accepting of the two numeric formats that we adopted, so we went that route," says Genevieve Arpin, a spokesperson for the payments association.
Since the popularity of the options is mostly tied to geography, the group decided to call one of them "English" and the other "French."
As it happens, when the group says "English," it's actually referencing the "American" format, and "French" really means "European," used by the rest of the world with a few exceptions, including Japan, which marches to its own Kodo beat.
In the United States and, increasingly Canada (see above), today's date — January 23, 2005 — would be 01/23/2005, or 1/23/05 for short. In Europe, it would be 23/01/2005, a numerical version of 23 January 2005 or le 23 janvier 2005. Like a broken clock that shows the correct time twice a day, the two sides agree with one another 12 times a year — January 1, February 2, March 3, and so on.
TheStar.com - Is today 23/01/2005 or 2005/01/23?: "Is today 23/01/2005 or 2005/01/23?"
We can put a man on the moon but we can't agree on what the date is
KENNETH KIDD
FEATURE WRITER
The Canadian Payments Association, central clearing house for the country's financial institutions, says it wants to start processing cheques electronically. No more shuttling five million cheques between various banks every weekday; they'll just scan the little chits into a computer and, voila, consider it cleared.
This will, alas, also mean changes to your everyday life. In the not-too-distant future, you won't be writing out the date in the big round hand Miss Olsen taught you in grade school, as in "January 23, 2005." For cheques to be scanned, the dates will have to be rendered in numbers alone, not a mix of both.
This sounds simple, but the realm of numeric dating — using just numbers to signify dates — is a tossed salad of idiosyncrasies. Consider 01/02/03. That could mean February 1, 2003; or January 2, 2003; or perhaps March 2, 2001. Or something completely different.
So the payments people, after much confabbing and canvassing, have come up with two options. You can use numbers to represent the day, month and year, in that order, or you can do it month, day and year. The cheque will be printed with a legend, such as DD/MM/YY, letting everyone know which style you picked when you ordered your cheques.
"Some of our member financial institutions indicated that their research showed consumers would be more readily accepting of the two numeric formats that we adopted, so we went that route," says Genevieve Arpin, a spokesperson for the payments association.
Since the popularity of the options is mostly tied to geography, the group decided to call one of them "English" and the other "French."
As it happens, when the group says "English," it's actually referencing the "American" format, and "French" really means "European," used by the rest of the world with a few exceptions, including Japan, which marches to its own Kodo beat.
In the United States and, increasingly Canada (see above), today's date — January 23, 2005 — would be 01/23/2005, or 1/23/05 for short. In Europe, it would be 23/01/2005, a numerical version of 23 January 2005 or le 23 janvier 2005. Like a broken clock that shows the correct time twice a day, the two sides agree with one another 12 times a year — January 1, February 2, March 3, and so on.
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