Are we really supposed to trace this given how ancient it is? If we really want to do far we would eventually reach ancient Chinese emperor era names that even confuse historians
Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
#22[deleted]
Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
#23I 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
But that redirect (intentionally or not) doesn't include the fragment part of the URL, so it might not have satisfied the other poster's intent.
Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
#24It’s funny to see this on HN. I wrote this 11 years ago as an undergraduate.
The afternotes at the end of the post are worth reading; people have sent me various qualifications and corrections over the years.
Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
#25This is clearly the wrong way to think about it. Dates forward and backward from this flag date exist in both calendars and it's straightforward to convert between them.
Such a flag day didn't involve removing days from one calendar or the other, it switched between them.
Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
#26Is the stack trace in the Ruby transcript invisible for anyone else? It seems to show up as white text on a white background.
Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
#27This is clearly the wrong way to think about it. Dates forward and backward from this flag date exist in both calendars and it's straightforward to convert between them. Such a flag day didn't involve removing days from one calendar or the other, it switched between them.
The way I imagine it is like the calendars are both rulers that are slightly off from each other. We were using one ruler, and at a certain point we went from using one to the other, so our "present" was never mapped to those dates. But you can represent any point in time as any of those calendars, like we can represent a specific temperature as Fahrenheit or Celsius. The calendars extend forwards and backwards to infinity.
Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 po…
If a contract dated to the 4th October 1582 specifies you have 15 days to make payment, you would indeed need to know where that contract was signed to determine on what day that deadline expired. And if there is a contract dated to the 6th October 1582, that does raise questions about its legitimacy (though in general misdating a contract does not void it, it would merely be one point of evidence in your argument th…
I was thinking of contracts that say "payment is due on 6 October" from before they knew the date of the change.
It's one of those "well technically" things programmers love to obsess over and the judge just says "everyone knows what was meant, stop being an idiot."
Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
#29There seems to be disagreement about the year. Two systems I checked assume 1752, not 1582.
(OpenBSD)
$ man cal
[...]
The Gregorian Reformation is assumed to have occurred in
1752 after the 2nd of September. By this time, most
countries had recognized the Reformation (although a few
did not recognize it until the early 1900s). Eleven days
following that date were eliminated by the Reformation, so
the calendar for that month is a bit unusual.
[...]
-s country_code
Assume the switch from Julian to Gregorian Calendar at
the date associated with the country_code. If not
specified, ncal tries to guess the switch date from the
local environment or falls back to September 2, 1752.
This was when Great Britain and her colonies switched
to the Gregorian Calendar.Re: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
#30This article presents a grossly simplified version of events. The truth is that only some catholic countries switched in 1582. Britain and its colonies switched in 1752. Prussia switched in 1610. And so on.