Paul Gilmartin wrote: | That would be a proleptic Gregorian date? and the answer to his question is that the dates of all days that occur before a calendar's epoch origin are proleptic for that calendar by definition. Their day numbers are negative. The use of a fullword for Gregorian day values provides the capacity for specifying dates about 10 million years before and after the Gregorian epoch origin, 0000 December 31 or 0001 January 1, depending upon one's preference for zero-origin or one-origin subscripting and the like. Whether such dates are common or uncommon depends on context. Payroll systems do not deal in them; egyptologists do;. and I recently read a new biography of Alexander the Great (Alexander III of Macedon) that---except for its title page, copyright notice, and bibliography---deals only in proleptic dates: he was born in 356 BCE and died in 323 BCE. One of the most dispiriting things about the money and time that were spent on Y2K remediation is that it was almost all done very badly: all the old data representations, their calendar-arithmetic deficiencies, and the errors they give rise to were lovingly preserved.
John Gilmore ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
