Re: Representable date range: experiment results
Re: Representable date range: experiment results
- Subject: Re: Representable date range: experiment results
- From: "Nigel Garvey" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 01:26:11 +0100
Mark J. Reed wrote on Thu, 20 Oct 2005 21:51:41 -0400:
> Perhaps more relevantly, what you get back when you ask AppleScript
>for the year property of a date object is not an ordinal, it's a cardinal.
>:)
Obviously a bug. ;-)
>Anyway, sorry; I didn't mean to start an argument.
No. Nor I. My head still hurts from all the brick walls it hit in the
run-up to the year 2000!
> This is basically what I
>was trying to get across:
And I that, in the discussion of a convention, or of a system that
employs it, what is "correct" or otherwise is determined solely by that
convention. Any variation or admixture constitutes a different convention
and is thus a different discussion. The "Gregorian Calendar" is not the
same convention as the one used by astronomers with regard to BC years.
>5. The current behavior of AppleScript with regard to years prior to 1 AD is
>broken.
The behaviour of AppleScript with regard to years prior to 1000 AD and
subsequent to 9999 AD is not currently defined.
>Many people have been
>> misled too into explaining the lack of a year 0 as due to the fact that
>> the number 0 wasn't invented until a few hundred years after the
>> Christian calendar was. But they've been thinking numbers rather than
>> calendars.
>Ah, but there *is* a relationship there. If zero as a number - and more
>importantly, the concept of negative numbers - had been known (in Europe) at
>the time that Little Dennis established AD counting in the 500s, there would
>have been no need for the Venerable Bede to come up with the BC system later
>on. There would have already been a natural way to refer to years before 1
>AD: the year before 1 would be 0, the year before that -1, etc.
Dionysus's aim was to modify the Roman practice still in use at the time
(numbering the years of an emperor's reign) and to produce a calendar
based on his best estimate for year of Christ's birth. There were
calendars from previous eras that could be used to refer to years before
that. The point of a calendar was (and largely still is) to label years,
months, and days in some kind of context. The ability to calculate the
interval between events in different contexts would have interested only
a few. Bede too would have been more interested in relating things to
Christ's time than in implementing a through numbering system where
Christ's coming was just handy point on a continuum. What either of them
would have done had they known about zero and negative numbers is a
modern conceit.
NG
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