Endianness of date and address formats in Europe and the US
Endianness of date and address formats in Europe and the US
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/3788390
Repost from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8qt94a/endianess_of_date_and_address_formats_in_europe/
On the reddit comments some user wrote the address format for Russia is wrong on this map, they use big-endian as well.
Also Hungary is the only country in Europe where we use big endianness in names, aka Eastern name order: surname first, firstname second.
Oh no, the British are right about something. Careful or they'll get excited and start expanding again.
The American way just never made sense to me. But maybe it's a language thing. In Danish we would say "the 13th of January" when speaking of a date, not "January 13th". Also just makes sense that it's day of month of year (to me at least).
Bid Endian is the way to go, the mixed is bad though. You want the least sigificant first and go from nonspecific to specific. If you try to do little endian, then you end up with 6 min 20 hour 5th day 8th month, but you had to hold the little numbers in memory she whole way bc each needs more context while a year doesnt.
I’m an American, but always use big endian dates when naming files or folder on the computer. That way, an alphabetical sort is also a date sort. (Probably why ISO dates are also big endian.)
NUMBERS are big endian. You read them from left to right. 61 is greater than 16, no question asked. A date is just a special number, it's not decimal, but uses a custom system
I'm with Hungary for once, big to little is how numbers work as well so it makes the most sense to me
Hungary also uses big endian for names iirc. Like Doe John
Is the Wikipedia article on granularity wrong when it says the USA uses middle-endian addresses when there's both an apartment and a street address, e.g. "200 2nd Ave. South #358"?
For me big endian is logical, while middle endian just seems batshit insane.
While English messes up 11-19 when saying or writing with words, other languages like German keep up the ridiculous small-endian names even after 20 (einundzwanzig is "one and twenty").
Interesting how Europe has heterogeneity in different states, but somehow the US is all the same
Right? As if somehow US is one single country and Europe is a whole bunch of different countries.
I think this map is a bit stupid for this reason: US states are not direct members of UPU, the whole US is one member, so displaying US state boundaries on the lower map doesn't make sense.
There are no separate ICU locales for US states as well, all US is simply en_US. And the date format is closely tied to language, not necessarily the country, I guess minoroties use the date formats according to their language, not the official state version.
No I think it’s fine and my comment wasn’t sarcastic. US states really are similar to European countries, they are highly autonomous and have different laws and cultures. It could absolutely be the case that one state uses m/d/y and another uses d/m/y. We have states where you drive on the wrong side of the road (well, territories) and states where you aren’t allowed to turn right on a red light, and states where people call all soda pop “coke”, etc.
I think it really boils down to cultural homogenization and borders. Prior to the eurozone, Europeans couldn’t just walk across the border and live in another country. But the US has had that for its entire history. So perhaps cultural practices in the states homogenized earlier than in Europe; also language.