[thelist] Date sort algorithm

[snip]
Does anybody know a good date sort algorithm. Im wanting to pull a series of
events from a MySQL database, sorted in order of date using PHP.

One idea was to convert each date into a sort of timestamp number generated
from each element of the date but my preliminary attempts have failed...
[/snip]

If you do this, does it not work?

select theDate, the Event
from theTable
order by theDate

HTH!

Jay