Re: Friday 13th, try it yourself (was Language Wars..)

[Matthew.Healy@yale.edu (Matthew D. Healy)]

In article <3242D1EB.3F54@ford.com>, Clinton Pierce <cpierce1@ford.com> wrote:

> 
> See for yourself if the "Friday the 13th" thing is just a UL.  If you trust
> UNIX's 'cal' program, and that it does the Right Thing with Leap Years, the
> Gregorian/Julian switch etc..etc... This Perl script will show you the Truth:
> 

But this will be modulo your country, because different countries did
the Julian/Gregorian change in different years, ranging from the sixteenth
to the twentieth* centuries.  Most flavors of Unix cal do it when the
British and their colonies did.  Dunno whether customers in, say,
Sweden can get one where cal works for their country.

PS: About six months ago when I entered a thread on different dates of
Julian/Gregorian switching in another newsgroup, I got email from an
astronomer somewhere in Europe who told me his country (forget which
one) did a _really_ strange number on this: instead of stepping in
a single year, they had half a century with no leap years until
they were in sync with the Gregorian calendar!  Stick _that_ in cal's
pipe and smoke it!

*Yes, twentieth.  Until the last Tsar fell, Russia was still on the
Julian calendar.  That's why the "October revolution" took place in
November.

---------
Matthew.Healy@yale.edu
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