> … all the major predominantly English speaking counties will use mostly hyphens in the dd-mm-yyyy format.
Yes, which makes reasonable the complaint about mm-dd-yyy.
> So although there is ambiguity, it’s easily resolved by picking that as the default mentally and only back tracking on failure.
This is both more work and also error prone in the general case (although it works out fine in this case).
> Now in the more general case, this whole thing feels like a lieutenant/leftenant situation.
Not at all. Whether I read "lieutenant" or "leftenant", I know what you're talking about. If I read 2-10-23, I might miss your birthday party.
Even people in non-English-speaking countries write in English all the time, especially on the Internet.
Picking one default and back-tracking on failure really isn't that comforting nor the constant reminder that the date you thought it was might be something else.
… all the major predominantly English speaking counties will use mostly hyphens in the dd-mm-yyyy format. So although there is ambiguity, it’s easily resolved by picking that as the default mentally and only back tracking on failure.
Now in the more general case, this whole thing feels like a lieutenant/leftenant situation. We are annoyed simply because it’s not they way that we do things in a peculiar case, when otherwise the language is fully intelligible.