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Dates That Don't Exist (2015)

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Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)

#4
I suppose the Georgian calendar includes this gap officially? Or did the catholic world just jump from system to system? If it includes the gap officially, then yea, error is the right thing. But if we just moved to a new calendar, then arguably there should be no error. both calendars work for all dates continuously, and we could have conversion functions etc. The gap is just a big flag day (week.)

imo, if i am using Georgian i want that system even retroactively, just like projecting a date back into the stone age. I don't care that a particular geography or culture changed calendars.

So I suppose what is really going on is that some libraries are using Georgian consistently, and others are using some hybrid "civic" calendar that tracks what the romans and the catholics were using, so dates in history books make sense.

Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)

#5
post #4

I suppose the Georgian calendar includes this gap officially? Or did the catholic world just jump from system to system? If it includes the gap officially, then yea, error is the right thing. But if we just moved to a new calendar, then arguably there should be no error. both calendars work for all dates continuously, and we could have conversion functions etc. The gap is just a big flag day (week.) imo, if i am usin…

The proper name for the calendar using the Gregorian system before the start of the Gregorian calendar is "the proleptic Gregorian calendar".

Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)

#6
post #2

I tried to create a date object in Swift from the date October 5, 1582. The resultant date object was October 15th 1582.

This is (weirdly) in line with behaviour I've observed in iOS's date picker; if you set a block of dates as not available, and the selected date inside of that unavailable block, it will automatically select the first available date on open.

Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)

#7
post #4

I suppose the Georgian calendar includes this gap officially? Or did the catholic world just jump from system to system? If it includes the gap officially, then yea, error is the right thing. But if we just moved to a new calendar, then arguably there should be no error. both calendars work for all dates continuously, and we could have conversion functions etc. The gap is just a big flag day (week.) imo, if i am usin…

Contracts and other similar types of financial instruments existed by this time there must be some way they handled it because something that said that it happened on a date that never occurred - sounds like what lawyers live for.

I’ll draft a Dubia so that when future popes change the calendar they will include a representative code sample and details about how we handle this.

(It’s important to remember that the pope and friends were operating much more like an international standards body than a religious leader when doing things like this.)

Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)

#8
I wonder how many libraries correctly handles the date 1712-02-30 in the Swedish calendar (according to Wikipedia the only official 30th of February in history)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Feb...

Tried using ncal like in the examples in that blog post, but it did not work correctly using either Julian or Gregorian. Of course the Swedish calendar from 1700-1712 was neither, but somewhere in-between, because of the (failed) attempt to gradually move from one to the other.

Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)

#9
post #8

I wonder how many libraries correctly handles the date 1712-02-30 in the Swedish calendar (according to Wikipedia the only official 30th of February in history)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Feb... Tried using ncal like in the examples in that blog post, but it did not work correctly using either Julian or Gregorian. Of course the Swedish calendar from 1700-1712 was neither, but somewhere…

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Feb...

Meta: one can also link to this article, which redirects:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_30

Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)

#10
post #4

I suppose the Georgian calendar includes this gap officially? Or did the catholic world just jump from system to system? If it includes the gap officially, then yea, error is the right thing. But if we just moved to a new calendar, then arguably there should be no error. both calendars work for all dates continuously, and we could have conversion functions etc. The gap is just a big flag day (week.) imo, if i am usin…

Think it depends on usage? Taking October 1st and 20th, and you want to know how many days passed, what's the right answer? If it's days lived, you would want the answer to not be 20, as some of those days didn't happen. But in some other context (perhaps something transitioning to the calendar earlier), they did?
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