On Oct 6, 5:11 pm, Christian Heimes <li...@cheimes.de> wrote: > Ben Finney wrote: > > If you're committed to changing the epoch anyway, I would recommend > > using <URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering> > > (epoch at 4004 BCE) since it is widely used to unify dates referring to > > human history. > > I prefer JDN or MJD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JDN) for dates long > before or after the unix epoch. The conversion from JDN as float to a > datetime object is trivial.
I think the choice of epoch is not a big deal, once you pick one far enough back. Ben Finney's suggestion to use 4004 BCE is not appreciably different (computationally) from JDN. (Though I will say that the Wikipedia link he provided doesn't mention 4004 BCE, and if anything suggests using 1 CE as the epoch.) If there is any difficulty, it would be determining whether historical records used (for example) the Julian calendar or Gregorian. This doesn't seem to be a factor for the OP's use case, so my recommendation would be to just pick whatever's convenient (either because some library or program uses it, or because it makes intuitive sense to the programmer). John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
