Re: CDate() different value in VB6 and SQL 2005

Wow...seems you know a lot more about this subject than I do. Then again, you've been around longer than I have, so that's to be expected. <gd&r>


Rob

Ralph wrote:
"Robert Morley" <rmorley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uwoyRL0cIHA.3932@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The way I figure it, when the US first got out from under the thumb of
England, I believe there was a very anti-British attitude at the time.
This
led to things like changing spelling, just to show how not-British they
were, and they probably did the same thing with dates. They didn't change
the order because it made sense, they changed it because it wasn't what
the
Brits used. The wording probably just followed from that.

That's entirely speculation, with a smidgen of historical knowledge thrown
in, but it sounds good to me. :)

<snipped>

It is perhaps common enough to think that there was a great deal of
'anti-British' sentiment in early American history, but it was really more
of an exuberance of anything "Americana". For example, while Noah Webster
himself fantatically hated England his Dictionary and Speller were popular
because they were "American".

As for the order of the elments in a Date. The wording did come first. In
fact, "February 19, 2008" was the common way of writing a date on both sides
of the Atlantic until the 1920's, when the Brits started pushing their
current method. You can check this yourself by doing any research into old
letters, birth registeries, etc. With one interesting exception - very
formal writing or legal documents.

For example, in the '50s I was taught if writing a letter I used this format
at the top...
February 19, 1952
but within a formal letter you were do this ...
.... 19th of February, 1952. ...

You still see this today in US Legal Documents where date are formatted one
way in headings or preface, but the other when embedded within it.

Pure guess on my part, but I think the dd/mm/yyyy likely came about in
England simply because of the notation. Using an abbreviated form wasn't
common in the US until after WWII. It was adopted in England and Europe much
sooner. In the '50s driver licenses, school records, and the ilk were always
"Feb 19 1952". Perhaps because of confusion by returning GIs (military
always used dd/mm/yyyy) I even remember a time when a check had to be dated
with the Month spelled out or banks wouldn't accept it. Printed forms were
always "Month: Day: Year: ". In the US the "__/__/__" format itself is
rather recent. But once it started it appeared everywhere.

Kind of like those Smiley Faces. <g>

-ralph


.

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