C :: How To Check Dates In Programming

I'm supposed to make a program that can tell which date, out of any number of dates entered by the user, is the earliest date. However, this is based off another program that I did not do in the last chapter. Since it's a pretty simple program to use as the base for the more "generalized" one, I decided to make the more basic one that can only take two dates, first. If it was just one integer, I could just use date1 for the first date and date2 for the second date, but each date uses 6-8 separate numbers.

how do I tell it something like, "if(date1 < date2)", with date1 and date2 including their month, day, and year. I could do a separate integer name/tag (I forgot what they're called) for each number, but that sounds like doing a lot more adding and subtracting, and like it could easily get messy.Should I, or can I, add all the numbers under the "date" together to see which date has the "lowest number" or "earliest date", or should I somehow handle each number, that is month, day, and year, separately?Here's the code so far:

Code:

include <stdio.h>int main(void)
{
int date1, date2;
printf("Enter first date (mm/dd/yy):
");
scanf("%d/%d/%d", &date1);
printf("Enter second date (mm/dd/yy):
}

[code]....