Calendar issues
Norbert Lindenberg
ecmascript at norbertlindenberg.com
Fri Sep 14 12:32:02 PDT 2012
Sounds like we're converging on a proleptic Gregorian calendar with no year 0. Any objections?
Thanks,
Norbert
On Sep 13, 2012, at 15:48 , Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
> I really was not very clear about what I think; sorry for rambling a bit.
>
> Yes, I agree that the best result for Gregorian is to have correct era support, which means there is no year zero: you have 2 AD, 1 AD, 1 BC, 2 BC,...
>
> Mark
>
> — Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Norbert Lindenberg <ecmascript at norbertlindenberg.com> wrote:
> The output of Date.prototype.toLocaleString and DateTimeFormat.prototype.format is also intended for normal people, not for techies. So why should we introduce a year 0 for them?
>
> Norbert
>
>
> On Sep 13, 2012, at 13:31 , Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
>
> > In ICU, we are using Gregorian eras (AD/BC) as customarily interpreted, and there is no year zero. There isn't a simple way to get non-era years—and that form is mostly interesting to techies, not normal people, which is why we support the era form.
> >
> > (If someone wanted to do it, you could probably get reasonable results by taking the input date, parsing with a calendar, and if the year < 1, set the year field to 1-year, get the date pattern for the locale, get the number pattern for a negative integer in the locale, insert the prefix/suffix around the year field in the date pattern, and format the Calendar date. That's be a dozen or two lines of code, but would need some extra code for exceptions.)
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > — Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 8:40 AM, Norbert Lindenberg <ecmascript at norbertlindenberg.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sep 13, 2012, at 6:55 , Andrew Paprocki wrote:
> >
> > >>>> and Explorer formats it as being in the year 1 BC. Safari calculates the day
> > >>>> according to the Julian calendar, all others use the proleptic Gregorian
> > >>>> calendar.
> > >
> > > That is very surprising to me. Can anyone comment on why Safari chose
> > > that implementation?
> >
> > Probably because that's the default used for date and time formatting in ICU. ICU can be made to use a proleptic calendar by setting the Gregorian cutover to the beginning of time; I don't see an easy way to make it introduce a year 0.
> >
> > Norbert
> >
> >
>
>
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