On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:42:10 +0900, David A. Black wrote:

> Hi --
> 
> I'm noticing this change, and wondering about it:
> 
> irb(main):001:0> RUBY_VERSION
> => "1.8.6"
> irb(main):002:0> require 'date'
> => true
> irb(main):003:0> puts Date.parse("1/2/3").mon 1
> 
> irb(main):001:0> RUBY_DESCRIPTION
> => "ruby 1.9.0 (2008-11-12 revision 20227) [i386-darwin9.5.0]"
> irb(main):002:0> require 'date'
> => true
> irb(main):003:0> puts Date.parse("1/2/3").mon 2
> 
> Am I neglecting to set something I should be setting to get US behavior
> in 1.9?
> 
> 
> David

You're not looking at the whole behavior of Ruby 1.9
irb(main):005:0> Date.parse("1/2/3").year
=> 2001

Whereas in Ruby 1.8
irb(main):002:0> Date.parse("1/2/3").year
=> 3

So there's a whole bunch of different behavior changes here, among them 
ruby1.9 has switched from American middle-endian dates to big-endian 
dates (not European little-endian dates as you're suggesting). 
Additionally, it's added century expansion.

--Ken

-- 
Chanoch (Ken) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/