From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Dec 06 2005 - 20:39:34 CST
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
> Michael Everson wrote:
>
>> In Ireland we prefer 4 digits; we use 06/12/2005. I believe that UK does
>> the same, or will do.
>
> That's usually a sign of Y2K indoctrination. Normal human UK practice is
> the same as it used to be - today is 7/12/05. Of course, a data of birth
> may need 4 digits for the year.
Not always needed. Andinfact extremely rare cases would cause problems
because legal restrictions or contracts generally make distinctions between
major and minor people, with the age of majority often at least 18 (meaning
that one wouldneed to live for 118 years to cause problems in contracts or
commercial transactions), or 16 for driving licences (but who drives a car
today even at age of 118 years?).
The only problem comes with pension systems (that exclude people from
benefit if they are not aleast 65 years old, even if parents have started to
invest for future childrens' pensions) and health care (valid at all ages).
For these systems it is obvious that the complete year of birth is
completely stored along with the person identifier (even if such identifier
often uses 2 digits only for the year of birth, like in France for INSEE
13-digit identifiers, duplicate identifiers being avoided by playing on the
value of another digit used for male/female distinction or in the digits of
the local registry subidentifiers).
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