But they can't do much with the totally ambiguous.

I don't see how its ambiguous if its defined and documented behavior. If a certain environment variable is set to 'MMDDYY' then you've got Ameri-centric dates, if its 'DDMMYY' then its more like the rest of the world. But like I said before, when we define a date field in our 4GL forms, we have no control (other than that environment variable) over what format is allowed or not, but at least its documented. One funny thing is that when I was writing something to access the database through ODBC, selecting a date field returned dates in 'YYYY-MM-DD' format, but if you turned around and tried to use that in a where clause, you'd get a syntax error (it's an old version of an Informix database, I don't know if newer versions accept 'YYYY-MM-DD' format).