Even worse with just two digits for the year! 01/02/03 could be 1 Feb 2003, or 2 Jan 2003, or 3 Feb 2001. Let’s just be thankful no one ever uses any of remaining three permutations.
$ LANG=C date --date="01/02/03" Thu Jan 2 00:00:00 EET 2003 $ LANG=de_AT.utf8 date --date="01/02/03" Do 02 Jän 2003 00:00:00 EET $ LANG=zh_HK.utf8 date --date="01/02/03" 2003年01月02日 星期四 00:00:00 EET
That only shows that date only converts on output and not on input.