As the new millennium approaches, I can see a chaos coming. It is the issue of date/time notation, deeply embedded in computer systems and application programs, video cassette recorders, government forms, etc. Using English names for months doesn't seem to be fashionable these days in the global economy. The US date format is MM/DD/YY (e.g. 07/21/94 or 7/21/94), while European format is DD/MM/YY (21/07/94 or 21/7/94). Here in Canada, it's a mixture of both formats along with YY/MM/DD.
So, what happens after the year 2000? Does any futurist forecast a time bomb that there is going to be some "difficulty" in socio-economic life? What does 03/04/02 mean? As for me, I have long adopted the ISO 8601-1988 ("Representations of time of the day" by the International Organization for standardisation, e.g., 1994-07-21T23:27) for all of my personal and business life for the sake of absolute simplicity and consistency. Well, I will be laughing all the way to the millennium. :-)
The issue of date/time representation is "religious", so the debate will never end. Fortunately, I can offer a solution: Make it completely uniform and standardised in the source, then have a personalised filter in human interface to customise it to his/her satisfaction. Given the future promise of every information being delivered electronically, the filter will merely alter 1994-07-25T13:43 into "le 25 juillet, 1994", "7/25/94", or any other specified format.
What other "religious" issues can be solved by this solution? Spelling is obviously the next and very easy one. Language and system of measurement (e.g. metric and imperial) are other examples. One of my projects is to develop a knowledge representation method for law, statutes and regulations in a single unified code, then have an intelligent filter to present it in the reader's choice: English, French, or any other. Unlike poetry, statutes and regulations are quite strict in structural format and grammar in any language. The law writers would have to acquire some "language programming skills", but the benefit is to have to maintain a single source for all languages, especially valuable in Canada, an officially bilingual country. The next step is to develop an "error-checker" which doesn't have to check spelling or grammar since they are correct-by-construction, but would check the concept and intention of the law. Finally, the system would allow an automatic interpretation and simulation of regulations based on personal profiles. I would eventually be able to tell how many laws I would have to obey.
The alternative is to stay with the human nature, having to maintain different versions of the same thing and pay hefty sum to human lawyers to merely interpret the law. The situation compares with the development of electronic mail system with different protocols, which only recently have begun to merge into the ITU X.400 standard available since 1984. What about those various formats in word processing programs, creating headaches for many people translating back and forth, while the solution has been available since 1986 in Standard Generalised Markup Language (ISO 8879)? The SGML, together with hypertext HYTIME is emerging only now as the "state of the art". If it were linked to Internet, I would be presenting this E-mail message with headlines and underscore rather than a lowly 7-bit ASCII code.
The concept can be applied to the Constitution of a Federal democracy, but that's another story, along with unemployed lawyers...
