On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 06:29:52PM -0400, Andrew Brown wrote:
> >2) The program assumes a crown-colony environment. By that I mean it
> >(cleverly) compensates for the switch from the Julian calendar to the
> >Gregorian calendar in the British Empire, in September 1752. Other parts
> >of the world switched at later or earlier times (I'm looking at
> >http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/khagen/GregConv.html which has a
> >good description). More Roman Catholic areas switched when the plan was
> >announced, in the 1580's. Protestant areas tended to wait until the 1700's
> >(with Sweeden changing its mind a few times). Areas looking more towards
> >Constantinople than Rome (Greek, Russian, Ukranian churches, etc.) tended
> >to wait until the 20th century. Russia and Russian-dominated areas for
> >instance changed after the Bolsheviks took power.
> >
> >If we add timezone support, it is a logical yet painful step to try and
> >add support for the above. :-(
> 
> ideally, imho, this sort of information should be in the time zone
> files.  information about when the gregorian reform was adopted
> actually (almost) falls into the scope of time zone stuff, since
> russia (or the soviet union as it then came to be known) didn't switch
> until after "Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 UTC 1901".  hmm....albania, bulgaria,
> estonia, greece, latvia, lithuania, romania, and yugoslavia also seem
> to be in that club.

The statement about about how those "looking more towards Constantinople"
didn't tend to switch until the 20th century is mostly correct. What is
left out of this is the fact that there are those who look east but
still haven't converted to the new calendar. This group includes some
hard liners associated with the New Calender people, and other non-hard
liners who are not associated with said New Calender people (Some Africans,
for example).

With immigration we now have people in the same cities using different
calendars. Those using the old calendar tend to refer to the "civil
calendar" and the "church calendar".

Wouldn't it be better to simply default to the Gregorian calendar and
have a flag to cause cal to use the Julian calendar? It would be simpler
and have less political bias.
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/

"It sounded pretty good, but it's hard to tell how it will work out
in practice." -- Dennis Ritchie, ~1977, "Summary of a DEC 32-bit machine"