1:02:03 04/05/06

[anarky]

:o :o My apologies, Kiz. I was half asleep. yetifoot, don't knock it unless you live here.

The official way for cheques and stuff is DD/MM/YYYY.
Legal documents are as follows:
This Sunday, the 16th day of March, 2006.
We are flexible. We don't require the written date anywhere else. Written receipts are written how they writer chooses to write it. If written in number format, it's as above but with either two or four digit year. Sometimes the year is ommitted... :|

We can also write Mar 16, or 16th Mar, but the year is always last.

[na_th_an]

for 1988 can you shorten it to something like XIIMM ? twelve before two thousand?

You can't. The rule states that the substraction can only be done with the immediate anterior figure which is a power of 10, i.e. you can only substract I from X, X from L or C, C from D or M, and so on. And you can just substract 1 power of 10, i.e. you can just make IX, XL, XC, CD and CM.

That's the only way to have a perfect set of rules, i.e., you can only represent a number with just one concrete string. If the substraction rules were more flexible, you could write 8 as VIII, as IIX, and whatever you could fancy, which is not very practical.