Date Formats

There are quite a few formats in common use for presenting the date.  The most common in the US is

MM-DD-YY, which represents today's date as
September 23, 2014, and can be abbreviated as Sep 23, 14 or even 9/23/14

In Europe, the most common is
DD-MM-YY, which represents today's date as
23 September 2014 and be similarly abbreviated
Some people also use the "big endian" version of this
YY-MM-DD, which comes out
2014 September 23, which has a certain appeal. (This is ISO 8601)

as long as everybody is using the same format, it doesn't really matter that much which we use.  But too often, you can't tell.  After a lot of thinking about it, I've concluded that little endian euro style is the way to go.  the biggest advantage is that it requires no punctuation or even spaces to remain readable:

23Sep14 is almost as decipherable as 23 September 2014 and requires only 7 bytes to represent all possible 21st century dates.  (it takes 3 letters to disambiguate March from May and June from July.)   by adding two more to indicate the century, 23Sep2014 is completely unambiguous, self documenting, (no Y2K problem!) and can represent any date from the reign of Augustus to 31Dec9999 in 9 human readable bytes.   If for some reason I choose to write it 2014Sep23, you can still read it correctly.

If I write it Sep2314, you can still probably figure it out, but it could also be 14 Sep 2023.  If I go really crazy and write "91101", you aren't really sure it's a date at all--it could be a zip code (it happens to be Pasadena, CA).  Or it could be 1 Jan 1991, 9 Nov 2001, or 11 Sep 2001.

So, unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, I use Euro little endian when I write the date: 23 Sep 2014.