Currently the date format is complicated but I can say with certainty which date corresponds to which text.
If you allow the formatting people will be able to have
01/02/03
for
1 Feb 2003
2 Jan 2003
1 Mar 2002
3 Jan 2002
2 Mar 2001
3 Feb 2001
Which is really hard to figure out (currently I use the assumption that dates are in incrementing series and the date format changes infrequently, but that doesn't make it easy)
I really think you should adopt the international standard
yyyy/mm/dd date format, and just tell your users to be happy - but I prefer the dictatorship approach to software engineering
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