Birthdate field format

I have a birthdate defined as a date field. People want to type in the date because the calendar icon takes too long to go back decades. The date format for the application is [E,MMM dd,yyyy] because in other parts of teh application showing the day of the week and month are very useful.

No matter how much I instruct the users they want to type the date in as mm-dd-yyyy. The problem is that it seems to take 01-02-1980 as Feb 2, 1980.

Is Zoho planning on having date formats that are specific to a field instead of the entire application?

Any suggestions on how to have people type in a date and usually get it right?

Herb Wexler