Re: Software Engineering News Brief

[kst@thomsoft.com (Keith Thompson)]

In <dewar.848250425@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> Going back a bit further would have been simple enough, true, assuming
> everyone agrees that 1900 was not a leap year (is that true, across all
> governments likely to be involved?)

The answers to this and many other calendar questions can be found in
the Calendar FAQ at <http://www.pip.dknet.dk/~pip10160/calendar.html>.

Several countries switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar
after 1900, including Russia, Greece, China, and possibly Japan.
(1900 is a leap year under the old Julian calendar, but not under the
current Gregorian calendar.)  Whether those countries refer to dates
before the change using the current calendar or the one in effect at
the time is another question -- probably for another newsgroup.

In any case, those countries could have problems with package Calendar
even if it doesn't cover dates before 1901, since package Calendar
doesn't reflect the skipped dates.  To see an example of the problem,
here's the output of the Unix command "cal 9 1752".

   September 1752
 S  M Tu  W Th  F  S
       1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

See also the newsgroup comp.software.year-2000.

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@thomsoft.com <*>
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