Re: The Emacs Calculator and calendar

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

Jay Belanger <jay.p.belanger@gmail.com> writes:

> As much as there is one, the consensus in this discussion seems to be
> that the pure Gregorian calendar should be the default, but the user
> should be able to explicitly ask for something else (from a choice of
> other options and, perhaps, some more general settings could be
> available).

I think what would be most useful to users is for a message to to appear
in the echo area informing the user that the result is given in the
Gregorian calendar and other calendars may apply whenever the result is
a historical date (before 1900 if we use the Russian case as the
cutoff). The message could also inform about Emacs functions to convert
between calendar systems, or even offer keyboard shortcuts to do the
conversion immediately (in the case of calendar).

Although there are calendars other than Gregorian still in use today,
the message might be seen as noise if it appears for every calendar
calculation, and people wanting those calendars probably don't need
reminding that the date may differ between calendars.