How to force US date formats in a non-US region

I’m helping a friend in Central America to debug a simple age-calculation procedure but he’s using US dates and I’m using Australian-style dates (31 Oct instead of Oct 31). I’ve reset my Language and Region location to the US, my time zone to Central America and my date formats to US-style but my Pan6 calculations insist on using Australian-style date interpretation. How do I masquerade as an American for this purpose?

I think you have to relaunch Panorama 6 to get it to recognize the new settings. Panorama X, on the other hand, will recognize the changed settings immediately.

That’s not it - I rebooted the Mac each time I made a change.

You certainly shouldn’t have to reboot. I have no further ideas. When you say “Pan6 calculations” what exactly do you mean? Really the only function that is affected by the settings is date(.

If you have the date of birth as a date field in your database, shouldn’t the age() function work independently of your machine’s date format?

No - the d/b has DoB as text so I have to use the date( function to insert it into the age( function. I stuck this code in front of everything else:

message "US age is: " + str(age(date("06-30-1937")))
if error
    message "Australian age is: " + str(age(date("30-06-1937")))
endif

The output is “Australian age is 79”, showing that my Mac is not using US dates.

That’s all I’m using. Both

Age = pattern( (today()-date(NewDate))/365.25,"#,")

and

AgeNum = age(date(NewDate))

fail.

If the date of birth is in a text field using the pattern “mm-dd-yyyy”, then you could split the field into separate day, month, and year fields, or you can use text funnels to rearrange the date according to Australian date format – without making any changes to system preference settings.

Seems to me that the error case will only happen if what is in the Day part could not also be a legal month value (i.e. greater than 12). A date like “03-07-1937” is “legal” in either format (no error) but is not equivalent.

True - and they all work that way. But my friend in Central America can’t get it to work so I need to test US-style dates to see why not. But it’s now OK - I sent the file to Tom Cooper who kindly tested it and it ran - so there’s something else wrong at Orlando’s end.