Re: The Emacs Calculator and calendar

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 10/08/2012 06:39 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:

> For Los Angeles you could probably understand everything using the
> "Spain" jurisdiction.

After 1556 yes, but before that the Spanish variant of the
Julian calendar is probably not what users want.

And Los Angeles is an easy case.  Often it's harder.  Would
we ask Budapest users to manually switch among all the
jurisdictions that have controlled that city: "Hungarian",
"Romanian", "Austro-Hungarian", "Habsburg", "Ottoman",
"Angevin", etc., etc.?  That'd be even more work for
Budapest users than what we have now, where they just pick
the calendar they want.

> What did Russia do for a calendar before 1700?

It was a mess.  Partly it used the Byzantine calendar, where
the year before 1700 AD was 7207 AM (and it was a short year
-- four months long).  But medieval Rus also used at least
two other calendars, which were similar to the Byzantine but
which started the year at different dates.

> And what do modern historians use when writing dates for
> that period?

It depends.  You have to check.  I just did a Google Books
search for chronologies of medieval Russia and examined the
first book I found, and it says on pages xii-xiii that it
uses Gregorian for everything.  But Julian is also common.
The book I checked was:

Langer LN, Historical Dictionary of Medieval Russia,
Scarecrow Press (2002), ISBN 0-8108-4080-4.