>>By later experiments I found that if I have SET DATE LONG or SET DATE SHORT or SET DATE DMY / MDY / YMD
>>
>>then the SET HOURS settings are ignored. If I use SET DATE USA (or any other setting), then SET HOURS are respected by the displayed value.
>
>It does make sense for SET DATE LONG and SET DATE SHORT as it specifies it uses the formats as configured in the control panel (implying it reads the locale information). However, I don't think the SET DATE DMY/MDY/YMD will behave the same (did quick experiement and noticed that SET DATE DMY/MDY/YMD does seem to honor the SET HOURS setting. It could've been a "side effect" of using SET DATE LONG or SET DATE SHORT that you might've observed).

SET DATE SHORT
then
SET DATE MDY

will not respect SET HOURS.