Hello Chris. My 100% support for your arguments! It's been annoying for years and it still is.

But - as I found out, even a lot of experienced developers don't know, that passing an 8-digit string (without any formatting characters) ALWAYS interprets as YYYYMMDD. I mostly resort to this.

CREATE PROCEDURE TEST(@myDate AS DATETIME) ...

called as TEST('20050301') will always be correct (march 1st). And there's no problem in any frontend-app to strip any formatting out (e.g. .,/)

The drawback to this approach is when it comes to time-parts. Unfortunately, there's no analogous 'general time format', eg. ('20050301123412999'). That would be great until the ISO-committe finally agrees on world wide date format which is designated to happen in 2083, as my great-grandfather told me 20 years ago.

regards,

PS: As for the clumsiness Steve is talking about: I left Query Analyzer installed. And that's what I use in 99%.