- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 14:19:45 +0300
Earlier I raised the issue that WF 2.0 does not say what should be done about leap seconds, but I did not suggest a solution. Having read more about the subject, I suggest that date calculations in WF 2.0 be POSIXly correct and ignore leap seconds. (See IEEE 1003.1, 2004 Edition, section 4.14 Seconds Since the Epoch or the corresponding section in ISO/IEC 9945-1.) Another problem I see is that ISO 8601 leaves wiggle room with dates that predate the use of the Gregorian calendar. I think there are three politically correct ways of approaching this: 1) Mandating the use of the proleptic Gregorian calendar all the way to 0001-01-01. 2) Prohibiting dates before 1924-01-01. (By that time, all countries that previously used the Julian calendar had upgraded to the Gregorian calendar for non-religious purposes, according to Wikipedia.) 3) Require the change from Julian to Gregorian between 1582-10-4 and 1582-10-15. (Dates from Wikipedia--caveat lector.) This is the ICU default behavior, BTW. The politically incorrect way that comes to mind is what the Unix cal utility does: Following the British Julian to Gregorian upgrade. (Run the command 'cal 9 1752' on a *nix system to see what I mean.) I'm inclined to think that the best option for WF 2.0 is to require the use of the proleptic Gregorian calendar all the way to 0001-01-01. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 10 April 2006 04:19:45 UTC