Apparently some of the Scandinavian countries do it by far the 'best' way, yyyy/mm/dd which means you can easily do simple comparisons for which date is later than another.
I've always wondered about the reasoning behind the American method?, can anyone explain why it's done that way?.
From a computing point of view, I always used to convert dates to Julian numbers, this gives you the easiest calculations on them, and it's easily converted back to any format you want, including the day of the week.