[phobos] datetime review

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2010-10-12 à 17:14, Jonathan M Davis a écrit :

> I'm sure that there are applications which care about calendars other than the Gregorian Calendar, but I really do think that it's a niche need.

I agree to that it's niche, at least in the part of the world where I leave.


> As part of making the world interconnect better, a lot of this sort of thing is increasingly being standardized, so I would expect alternate calendars to actually be needed less rather than more.

That's a way to see things. But standardization doesn't always work, sometime because something is seen as a cultural icon, or it just takes much longer than you'd expect. How long did it take for everyone to abandon Julian and pass to Gregorian? Adoption: 1582 in Rome, 1752 for Britain, 1918 for Russia, 1924 for Greece. Total: 342 years; and all these countries were Christian.

Similarly to the Gregorian calendar being an ISO standard, you could say that English is becoming de facto the international language today. This hasn't reduced the need for localization in software, quite the contrary: as computers are used more and more everywhere, the need for localization increased as it reached less technically-minded persons.

And Wikipedia says that many calendars other than Gregorian are currently in wide use today:

"""
While the Gregorian calendar is widely used in Israel's business and day-to-day affairs, the Hebrew calendar, used by Jews worldwide for religious and cultural affairs, also influences civil matters in Israel (such as national holidays) and can be used there for business dealings (such as for the dating of checks).

The Iranian (Persian) calendar is used in Iran and Afghanistan. The Islamic calendar is used by most non-Iranian Muslims worldwide. The Chinese, Hebrew, Hindu, and Julian calendars are widely used for religious and/or social purposes. The Ethiopian calendar or Ethiopic calendar is the principal calendar used in Ethiopiaand Eritrea. In Thailand, where the Thai solar calendar is used, the months and days have adopted the western standard, although the years are still based on the traditional Buddhist calendar. Bahá'ís worldwide use the Bahá'í calendar.
"""
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar#Currently_used_calendars>

Speaking of standardization: when is the US going to pass to the metric system? I don't really want an answer, but it shows that you shouldn't really count on standardization until has actually happened.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/