I'm the author of the Perl DateTime library. It works correctly as _documented_. Here's the first two paragraphs of the docs:
> DateTime is a class for the representation of date/time combinations, and is part of the Perl DateTime project.
> It represents the Gregorian calendar, extended backwards in time before its creation (in 1582). This is sometimes known as the "proleptic Gregorian calendar". In this calendar, the first day of the calendar (the epoch), is the first day of year 1, which corresponds to the date which was (incorrectly) believed to be the birth of Jesus Christ
Always RTFM.
Edit: I double-checked, and while this was not in the docs in the first release, it _was_ in the docs as of 2015.
It's typically not used in modern historical writing when referring to events located in areas that used the Julian calendar at that time.
But it is typically used when referring to events located in areas with no calendar system familiar to modern readers, most notably the Maya calendar. Maya Long Count dates are typically converted to the proleptic Gregorian calendar.
Also, many modern historical writings will display both Julian and Gregorian dates, particularly for dates around when the calendars were changing or when context is unclear (e.g. a historical figure who was born in an area with one calendar and died in an area with another calendar).
Considering it only diverges from the standard Gregorian for dates more than 400 years ago, it's not super relevant. Most people don't think about it. But it made a lot of sense to do the shift at the time. All recorded dates up to that point had been physically written down, so it would have been infeasible to migrate those all to the proleptic. If computers had been around, maybe things would have been different.
Fun fact: Greece was still using the old Julian calendar as of 1928, so it's entirely possible that you'll see dates on relatively recent Greek documents that are up to 14 days off from the calendar the rest of the world was using. Civil timekeeping is just a mess.
Who writes computer programs that deal with pre-1582 _dates_ at all?
In science-related code, I can image a case for calculating things like seconds elapsed across a very long time period. But in that case you're not really dealing with dates. Instead, you want something like the Unix epoch, but probably with an earlier epoch start.
There may be some very niche cases for pre-1582 dates in code that I'm not thinking of. But I'd expect that in this case you're going to put a lot of effort into finding the right libraries, or you might just write your own code.
Regardless, the linked blog post says of DateTime: "Unfortunately, like Python, a proper error message for impossible Gregorian dates is notably absent."
But this is just wrong. There's no "proper error message" to emit. The code works as documented.
Most applications don't have to worry about it, but platforms do. The SQL standard requires accurate date representation for years 0000-9999. I was surprised to learn about the Gregorian shift while testing our database system. I also learned about "war time" in WW2 and the "battle of the clocks" in colonial India. A lot of history came out of debugging those tests.
For sure. I was thinking more of "normal" applications, as opposed to things like SQL databases. It looks like the SQL standard explicitly calls for the use of the Gregorian calendar for dates, so I think that answers the previous question of "Who else uses the proleptic Gregorian calendar other than programmers of datetime libraries?"
"normal applications", no. But there are more platforms besides databases, e.g. programming languages. Any platform that works with dates will have to deal with these weird quirks. And application that works with dates probably would not, although there's always leap seconds...
Lots of written work pre 1582 that needs to be accurately catalogued.
Source: I used to work on one of the first computerised library management software systems, and plenty of our academic customers had manuscripts dating back that far.
Genealogical software, historical video games (CK2 has at least one mod which adds alternative calendars), I can imagine there are some needs for this in contract management software for countries with very old businesses and properties like England and Japan.
> Who writes computer programs that deal with pre-1582 _dates_ at all?
People writing knowledge base software, like Wikidata. It's helpful to be able to display historical dates in any desired calendar, and also to be able to do date arithmetic between any two arbitrary dates.
This point about using seconds is entirely correct, and date-time should always be in epoch timestamp (numeric) except for human interfaces (input or rendering for output). APIs and web-forms should never pass multipart date strings because they can be internally inconsistent, for example February 30.
(edit: unless there's no sequential meaning in the date and the date is just a local day name without the notion that adding or subtracting 1 takes you to yesterday or tomorrow (https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...)).
(p.s. autarch thanks for your efforts in open source).
I've been writing some programs to deal with the Maya Calendars, where it is an issue.
On some level, it doesn't matter if an inscription corresponds to "August 31, 83 CE" or "September 2, 83 CE" (a date potentially inscribed at the site Takalik Abaj in Proleptic Gregorian or Julian), but it's nice to try to get the details correct. And if you want to correlate with other events in history (especially if you can find astronomical event data from Europe), you need to be at least consistent.
Plus, it's just fun to think about these events from long ago in terms (dates) we understand.
> In essence, then, those ten days in 1582 never happened and simply do not exist within the Gregorian calendar system used almost universally in the West today.
I find these things so much easier to think about if you consider the change as a change from one calendar system to another calendar system. Those 10 days certainly exist, in both calendar systems, they just represent different points in time. I.e., I think it's easier to just consider both calendar systems as the rules, extended forward & backwards infinitely ("proleptic"). Some people switched from a Julian calendar to a Gregorian one in 1582.
"Some people did not experience days with these labels in some areas of the world" … I get where it's coming from, but it's not how I'd build a library.
If you worry about the switch, then you have to ask "which switch?" which TFA only lightly touches on. The 1582 one is famous, of course, but not everyone switched, and other parts of the worlds switched as time went on, to as late as 1918, when Russia switched.[1] (And you can see other messiness in that table, too.)
Needing to deal with it is niche enough that I think most language std libs should implement the proleptic Gregorian calendar, and let an application whose niche requires it deal with the switch (& whichever switch it requires).
> Those 10 days certainly exist, in both calendar systems.
Not in the standard Gregorian calendar. Those dates only exist in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. The standard Gregorian calendar explicitly skips them. That's because you can't feasibly go back and change all the Julian dates that had been physically written down for centuries. That's why it's called the Gregorian "shift".
The article is a bit old. It should have noted a new development in calendar technology if it was written half a year later.
> In A.D. 1582 Pope Gregory XIII found that the existing Julian calendar
insufficiently represented reality, and changed the rules about
calculating leap years to account for this. Similarly, in A.D. 2013
Rockchip hardware engineers found that the new Gregorian calendar still
contained flaws, and that the month of November should be counted up to
31 days instead.
> The Eastern Orthodox church even continued well after that, only switching to the Gregorian calendar in 1929.
Technically, they switched to the Revised Julian[0] calendar, not the Gregorian. Also, it was only some of the churches making up Eastern Orthodoxy that switched; others remain on the Julian calendar to this day, and all of them still use the Julian calendar to calculate the date of Pascha.
Fun related fact, many dates -- for example, birth dates on headstones -- of people born in countries observing Eastern Orthodox Christianity will have the prefix O.S. (old style) to disambiguate dates using the original Julian and either the Georgian or Revised Julian calendars which were in effect at that person's death.
A primary reason for the Catholic Church changing the calendar was to bring the date of Easter back into conformance with the decree of the Council of Nicaea on the topic. There was a controversy in the early Church on this, there were even miracles worked concerning the correct date -- see Dom Gueranger's "Liturgical Year" for some of the accounts.
There seems to be disagreement about the year. Two systems I checked assume 1752, not 1582.
(OpenBSD)
$ man cal
[...]
The Gregorian Reformation is assumed to have occurred in
1752 after the 2nd of September. By this time, most
countries had recognized the Reformation (although a few
did not recognize it until the early 1900s). Eleven days
following that date were eliminated by the Reformation, so
the calendar for that month is a bit unusual.
(Ubuntu Linux)
[...]
-s country_code
Assume the switch from Julian to Gregorian Calendar at
the date associated with the country_code. If not
specified, ncal tries to guess the switch date from the
local environment or falls back to September 2, 1752.
This was when Great Britain and her colonies switched
to the Gregorian Calendar.
Which is one of the reasons that the Perl DateTime library just implements the proleptic Gregorian calendar (i.e. "let's just pretend we've always used Gregorian and the Julian calendar never existed")
This is clearly the wrong way to think about it. Dates forward and backward from this flag date exist in both calendars and it's straightforward to convert between them.
Such a flag day didn't involve removing days from one calendar or the other, it switched between them.
The way I imagine it is like the calendars are both rulers that are slightly off from each other. We were using one ruler, and at a certain point we went from using one to the other, so our "present" was never mapped to those dates. But you can represent any point in time as any of those calendars, like we can represent a specific temperature as Fahrenheit or Celsius. The calendars extend forwards and backwards to infinity.
I would think of it as Calendar A uses Calandar B until time point T and then uses Calendar C. These dates exist in Calendars B and C, but do not exist in Calendar A.
It's not a wrong way to think about it. There are some use cases for proleptic calendars, but there are just as many where it's completely inappropriate. If you ever need to compare what day you think it is with what day someone in the past thought it was, then yes those dates don't exist in any real sense.
I wouldn't say it's it's straightforward to convert between them, either. The Gregorian calendar was first adopted in 1582, but the UK and it's colonies didn't follow suit until 1752. Russia didn't convert until 1918, and Greece didn't switch until 1923. We're just over 100 years out from active use of the Julian calendar. So you have to know who the speaker is and where they are or where they are from to know what they mean.
Since these places switched at different times, they had to skip a different number of days. It was 10 in the 16th century. It was 13 in the 20th!
If you're reading a journal by a British man who lived in Russia through the end of the Great War and then moved to Greece in 1920, what does he mean when he's talking about a lunar eclipse he just witnessed?
I would say it's almost never appropriate unless you're directly quoting source texts.
If you are talking about a historical event from Egypt in 500 BCE, you would say "this happened in 500 BCE", not "this happened in year 26 of the 27th dynasty".
The distinction is important in the context of doing historical research, but it is no more appropriate to write dates in secondary sources using the Julian calendar than it would be to try to explain Egyptian history by spouting hieroglyphics at people.
Yeah, but how often are we talking about exactly specific dates without referring to specific historical texts?
The Magna Carta was sealed on June 15, 1215 for the Julian calendar. But if you want the actual anniversary, it was sealed on June 22, 1215 using the proleptic Gregorian calendar. Do you want to know the date people remember, ir the date of the true anniversary?
The coronation of Henry VIII is listed almost everywhere you look as June 24, 1509. Except that's also Julian. The date of the Gregorian calendar is July 4, 1509.
We don't remember the proleptic dates. We remember the dates that were then in use.
And if you say you're just always going to use the contemporary recorded date, that's fine. Until you get to dates like February 29, 1700. What do you put in your system then?
This is an interesting detail to learn about history. However, like the article mentions near the end, the Gregorian calendar was adopted at different times in different countries. The Anglican Church didn’t trust the Catholics, so Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750 ). And they did their best to hide the fact that they were adopting a Catholic invention: it’s the “New Style Calendar” and they came up with a different way to choose the same date for Easter.
1752 is late enough that Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others were born before that change.
I think that’s the reason that programming languages tend to adopt the proleptic Gregorian calendar and leave it up to the programmer to figure out when the calendar was adopted in the countries they care about.
Except that countries apparently had to answer various questions when they adopted the Gregorian calendar, and they didn’t all chose the same answers. Ideally, we’d have something like tzdb but for calendar adoption. But I guess the need doesn’t come up all that often.
1752 is before the invention of timezones, but that adds another curiousity about "what date did X happen?". On the calendar of Country A it could've been October 31, 1752, and on the calendar of Country B it would've been October 21...
The British (including the American colonies) also did an arguably even more confusing calendar change in 1752, by switching the start of the new year from March 25 to January 1.
“Despite the unification of the Scottish and English royal crowns with the accession of King James VI and I in 1603, and even the union of the kingdoms themselves in 1707, England continued to use Annunciation Style while Scotland used Modern Style. This led to the act being recorded at the time in England as 6 March 1706 (rather than 1707), because in England (unlike Scotland) it fell before the new year began (on 25 March).”
“WHEREAS the legal Supputation of the Year of our Lord in that Part of Great Britain called England, according to which the Year beginneth on the 25th Day of March, hath been found by Experience to be attended with divers Inconveniencies, not only as it differs from the Usage of neighbouring Nations, but also from the legal Method of Computation in that Part of Great Britain called Scotlond, and from the common Usage throughout the whole Kingdom, and thereby frequent Mistakes are occasioned in the Dates of Deeds, and other Writings, and Disputes arise therefrom.”
Although, I think “common usage” in that statement implies that it was common to just do what other countries did, except when filling out legal documents.
This whole story is built on one wrong assumption: that there are some clear rules defining calendar shifts. As the author discovers at the end this history differs in different countries, and what dates exist is not anymore easy to tell universally. But now let's recall countries are not the same anymore, so even ncal's admirably nerdy attempt to be precise is just a rough approximation. Then how about a Catholic town in a Protestant country, or vice versa? How about people using several calendars simultaneously for different purposes? The truth is there's no clear recipe for every case, and for ≈99.9999% cases proleptic Gregorian (which doesn't care) is completely fine.
So, the Proleptic Gregorian Calendar[1] refers to what you'd get if you extended the current Gregorian Calendar back in time before its introduction. (It agrees with the Julian calendar only during the 3rd century AD.) Most date libraries use the Proleptic calendar for simplicity. Ruby's DateTime is unusual insofar as, by default, it actually switches to the Julian calendar for dates before Oct 15 1582.
Using the proleptic Gregorian calendar for historical dates is only a problem if you want to compute the day of the week (which those missing days will throw off prior to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the relevant country) or the number of days between two historical dates (if the two dates span the date when the Gregorian calendar was adopted).
And, frankly, there are other problems to deal with beyond correctly handling the Julian/Gregorian switch. In Nelson's Navy, for example, the new day started at noon rather than midnight as we'd expect. AM could be June 1st, PM could be June 2nd, and both could be Tuesday.
And then there are lots of historical events with dates like "on or about August 6th" or "mid-September" or the "in the Fall of".
Trying to deal with historical dates in what a programmer would consider a perfectly correct way is something of a fool's game.
In our Dip (in house db) client library, we built what we called a policy that auto selects partitions based on every crud operations. The policies can be specified once for each collection in collections.json based on fields or query.
So for policies where partition involves the date type fields, be it range or fixed dates, it was incredibly hard to generate universal date names from ranges.
The policy mechanism was finished fairly quickly as Dip is inherently distributed first. But reasoning about date names was so incredibly hard.
The missing dates mentioned in the article did come up during development adding to the woes.
But the upside now is that application code no longer worries about the distributed partitions. Policy handles that. Some sort of architecture as code. Don't know whether AAC is an existing term or whether we coined it.
This is (weirdly) in line with behaviour I've observed in iOS's date picker; if you set a block of dates as not available, and the selected date inside of that unavailable block, it will automatically select the first available date on open.
This article presents a grossly simplified version of events. The truth is that only some catholic countries switched in 1582. Britain and its colonies switched in 1752. Prussia switched in 1610. And so on.
I wonder how many libraries correctly handles the date 1712-02-30 in the Swedish calendar (according to Wikipedia the only official 30th of February in history)?
Tried using ncal like in the examples in that blog post, but it did not work correctly using either Julian or Gregorian. Of course the Swedish calendar from 1700-1712 was neither, but somewhere in-between, because of the (failed) attempt to gradually move from one to the other.
Are we really supposed to trace this given how ancient it is? If we really want to do far we would eventually reach ancient Chinese emperor era names that even confuse historians
In “The Future of Time,” the authors state that “different countries and religions adopted the reforms [the Gregorian calendar] at different times and in different ways. In 1712 Sweden added a February 30 to its national calendar.” There was a February 30 in Sweden in 1712, but the context in which it is presented in the article is misleading. In 1700 the Swedes decided to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar by eliminating leap-year days for 40 years. So 1700, which is a Julian leap year but not a Gregorian leap year, did not have a leap day. In both 1704 and 1708, through bureaucratic error, there were leap days. In 1712, the situation was resolved by switching back to the Julian calendar; this meant that the missing leap day that would have occurred in 1700 had to be added, and was, as February 30. It wasn’t until 1753 that the Swedes finally adopted the Gregorian calendar by making the date March 1 follow February 17.
tl;dr - ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone used absolute seconds counting to determine dates while DateTime used a proper Gregorian calendar. This means dates before October 15, 1582 have different internal values when compared.
The behavior showed up because a test was using a DateTime value to set a MySQL DATETIME column to the DB minimum value, which is 1000-01-01 00:00:00, and then comparing the DB record attribute to the original variable used to set it.
Something like:
date = DateTime.new(1000, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 'UTC')
record.update(happened_at: date)
record.happened_at == date # => false
I "discovered" the missing Gregorian dates when I wrote a loop counting forward in time from Jan 1, 1000 until the corresponding TimeWithZone and DateTime records returned true when compared with ==.
I suppose the Georgian calendar includes this gap officially? Or did the catholic world just jump from system to system? If it includes the gap officially, then yea, error is the right thing. But if we just moved to a new calendar, then arguably there should be no error. both calendars work for all dates continuously, and we could have conversion functions etc. The gap is just a big flag day (week.)
imo, if i am using Georgian i want that system even retroactively, just like projecting a date back into the stone age. I don't care that a particular geography or culture changed calendars.
So I suppose what is really going on is that some libraries are using Georgian consistently, and others are using some hybrid "civic" calendar that tracks what the romans and the catholics were using, so dates in history books make sense.
Contracts and other similar types of financial instruments existed by this time there must be some way they handled it because something that said that it happened on a date that never occurred - sounds like what lawyers live for.
I’ll draft a Dubia so that when future popes change the calendar they will include a representative code sample and details about how we handle this.
(It’s important to remember that the pope and friends were operating much more like an international standards body than a religious leader when doing things like this.)
If a contract dated to the 4th October 1582 specifies you have 15 days to make payment, you would indeed need to know where that contract was signed to determine on what day that deadline expired.
And if there is a contract dated to the 6th October 1582, that does raise questions about its legitimacy (though in general misdating a contract does not void it, it would merely be one point of evidence in your argument that it's a forgery, just like using a particular font in a modern printed contract)
I was thinking of contracts that say "payment is due on 6 October" from before they knew the date of the change.
It's one of those "well technically" things programmers love to obsess over and the judge just says "everyone knows what was meant, stop being an idiot."
I assume there is a way to handle this in modern contract law. Surely people have forgotten how long the various months are and written contracts referring to April 31.
It's one of the reasons that they spell it out, or do things like "define what month is, and then the payment is due X months out" and not on a specific date.
> there must be some way they handled it because something that said that it happened on a date that never occurred - sounds like what lawyers live for.
Yeah there are a lot of examples of dates being written two ways on the same document/artifact. In the Anglosphere there are two changes that happened close together: the movement of the new year from Lady Day to the first of January, and the Julian/Gregorian calendar jump, so that confounds things slightly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates
'A date object represents a date (year, month and day) in an idealized calendar, the current Gregorian calendar indefinitely extended in both directions.'
'This matches the definition of the “proleptic Gregorian” calendar in Dershowitz and Reingold’s book Calendrical Calculations.'
Think it depends on usage? Taking October 1st and 20th, and you want to know how many days passed, what's the right answer? If it's days lived, you would want the answer to not be 20, as some of those days didn't happen. But in some other context (perhaps something transitioning to the calendar earlier), they did?
Regarding computers and time, I always liked that in AmigaDOS, you could specify custom relative times.
It would natively display "Future" if the file timestamp was ahead of the system clock, but you could also add dates. I remember seeing directory listings like
Dealing with dates becomes much simpler conceptually when you realize that you are actually dealing with two different ideas masquerading as one: dates, and the actual instants in time which they name. Instants in time can only be unambiguously referenced by measuring some fixed unit of time intervals from some commonly agreed upon event (e.g. seconds since the Unix Epoch).
Dates are a mapping from human-readable labels to instants in time; critically, this mapping is not a total function (there are dates that map to no instant in time in a particular calendar, such as October 5-14 1582 in the Gregorian calendar, or 2:30am March 8 2026 in US timezones due to DST), nor is it in fact a function at all depending on how you define your inputs (1:30am November 1 2026 in US timezones is ambiguous if you don't specify DST/ST).
Furthermore, the mappings (both for past dates and future dates!) can themselves change over time (changes to DST, timezones, and calendars such as in TFA), and you need to keep track of these changes in perpetuity, as well as at which instant in time they were implemented, and we don't necessarily have that information for some of these historical changes, we only have the date as written down, which itself can suffer from the ambiguity problem (is it the date pre- or post- calendar change?).
This makes dealing with past dates tricky, and dealing with future dates speculative at best. For instance, what's February 28th + 1 day? The answer depends on the calendar system and the year; we can answer it definitively for past years but not necessarily for future years (maybe in 2040 we'll move the leap day to December 32nd). This is why it's important to immediately convert past dates (and sometimes future dates, depending on the use case) to unambiguous instants in time, and only convert them back to dates for display purposes.
"Wednesday, August 12th 2026" and "8 days from now" are also semantically distinct for some purposes: if have 8 doses of a daily prescription left, I'm still going to run out in 8 days even if tomorrow the government decides to repeal the Gregorian calendar, thus changing the name of "8 days from now" from "Wednesday, August 12th 2026" to "Sunday, August 2nd 2026". My medication doesn't care what the government decides to call 8 days from now, I'm going to run out either way. The pharmacy, on the other hand, very much does care what the government decides to call 8 days from now, because perhaps they're closed on Sundays. The calendar change means that "8 days from now" went from being not-a-Sunday to a Sunday, affecting their operating hours.
It's really just another instance of one of the two hard problems in computer science: naming things.
I get what you're saying, but if the government repealed the Gregorian calendar (and went back to Julian) that wouldn't change the day of the week. The day of the week is historically independent of the day of the month. Catholics and Protestants agreed on this in the calendar change. The original papal bull that set up the Gregorian calendar has Thursday 1582-10-04 followed by Friday 1582-10-15; Great Britain and colonies (if we're taking the US perspective) followed Wednesday 1752-09-02 with Thursday 1752-09-14.
Interesting, I didn't know that! I suppose I could edit my post accordingly, maybe a better example would be "the pharmacy won't let me get a refill until the date written on my prescription: Wednesday, August 12th 2026"? I think the point gets across regardless.
This "civic vs proleptic" split is a good use case for composite calendars: glue a few calendars together at their historical cut-over dates and the result behaves like one ordinary calendar.
I maintain an Elixir library (Calendrical) that does this. England, for example, is just three segments spliced onto a Julian base:
defmodule England do
use Calendrical.Composite,
calendars: [
~D[1155-03-25 Calendrical.Julian.March25], # year starts on Lady Day
~D[1751-03-25 Calendrical.Julian.Jan1], # New Year moved to Jan 1
~D[1752-09-14 Calendrical.Gregorian] # the 11-day jump
],
base_calendar: Calendrical.Julian
end
The "missing" days simply aren't valid dates, and stepping across the boundary jumps:
I'm the author of the Perl DateTime library. It works correctly as _documented_. Here's the first two paragraphs of the docs:
> DateTime is a class for the representation of date/time combinations, and is part of the Perl DateTime project.
> It represents the Gregorian calendar, extended backwards in time before its creation (in 1582). This is sometimes known as the "proleptic Gregorian calendar". In this calendar, the first day of the calendar (the epoch), is the first day of year 1, which corresponds to the date which was (incorrectly) believed to be the birth of Jesus Christ
Always RTFM.
Edit: I double-checked, and while this was not in the docs in the first release, it _was_ in the docs as of 2015.
https://metacpan.org/pod/DateTime
Who else uses the proleptic Gregorian calendar other than programmers of datetime libraries?
It's typically not used in modern historical writing when referring to events located in areas that used the Julian calendar at that time.
But it is typically used when referring to events located in areas with no calendar system familiar to modern readers, most notably the Maya calendar. Maya Long Count dates are typically converted to the proleptic Gregorian calendar.
Also, many modern historical writings will display both Julian and Gregorian dates, particularly for dates around when the calendars were changing or when context is unclear (e.g. a historical figure who was born in an area with one calendar and died in an area with another calendar).
Considering it only diverges from the standard Gregorian for dates more than 400 years ago, it's not super relevant. Most people don't think about it. But it made a lot of sense to do the shift at the time. All recorded dates up to that point had been physically written down, so it would have been infeasible to migrate those all to the proleptic. If computers had been around, maybe things would have been different.
Fun fact: Greece was still using the old Julian calendar as of 1928, so it's entirely possible that you'll see dates on relatively recent Greek documents that are up to 14 days off from the calendar the rest of the world was using. Civil timekeeping is just a mess.
Who writes computer programs that deal with pre-1582 _dates_ at all?
In science-related code, I can image a case for calculating things like seconds elapsed across a very long time period. But in that case you're not really dealing with dates. Instead, you want something like the Unix epoch, but probably with an earlier epoch start.
There may be some very niche cases for pre-1582 dates in code that I'm not thinking of. But I'd expect that in this case you're going to put a lot of effort into finding the right libraries, or you might just write your own code.
Regardless, the linked blog post says of DateTime: "Unfortunately, like Python, a proper error message for impossible Gregorian dates is notably absent."
But this is just wrong. There's no "proper error message" to emit. The code works as documented.
Most applications don't have to worry about it, but platforms do. The SQL standard requires accurate date representation for years 0000-9999. I was surprised to learn about the Gregorian shift while testing our database system. I also learned about "war time" in WW2 and the "battle of the clocks" in colonial India. A lot of history came out of debugging those tests.
For sure. I was thinking more of "normal" applications, as opposed to things like SQL databases. It looks like the SQL standard explicitly calls for the use of the Gregorian calendar for dates, so I think that answers the previous question of "Who else uses the proleptic Gregorian calendar other than programmers of datetime libraries?"
"normal applications", no. But there are more platforms besides databases, e.g. programming languages. Any platform that works with dates will have to deal with these weird quirks. And application that works with dates probably would not, although there's always leap seconds...
Library and Archival management systems
Lots of written work pre 1582 that needs to be accurately catalogued.
Source: I used to work on one of the first computerised library management software systems, and plenty of our academic customers had manuscripts dating back that far.
Genealogical software, historical video games (CK2 has at least one mod which adds alternative calendars), I can imagine there are some needs for this in contract management software for countries with very old businesses and properties like England and Japan.
> Who writes computer programs that deal with pre-1582 _dates_ at all?
People writing knowledge base software, like Wikidata. It's helpful to be able to display historical dates in any desired calendar, and also to be able to do date arithmetic between any two arbitrary dates.
This point about using seconds is entirely correct, and date-time should always be in epoch timestamp (numeric) except for human interfaces (input or rendering for output). APIs and web-forms should never pass multipart date strings because they can be internally inconsistent, for example February 30. (edit: unless there's no sequential meaning in the date and the date is just a local day name without the notion that adding or subtracting 1 takes you to yesterday or tomorrow (https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...)).
(p.s. autarch thanks for your efforts in open source).
I've been writing some programs to deal with the Maya Calendars, where it is an issue.
On some level, it doesn't matter if an inscription corresponds to "August 31, 83 CE" or "September 2, 83 CE" (a date potentially inscribed at the site Takalik Abaj in Proleptic Gregorian or Julian), but it's nice to try to get the details correct. And if you want to correlate with other events in history (especially if you can find astronomical event data from Europe), you need to be at least consistent.
Plus, it's just fun to think about these events from long ago in terms (dates) we understand.
Astronomy
That's its own fun rabbit hole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(astronomy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Coordinate_Time
Genealogy apps, e.g. Ancestry.com
It’s funny to see this on HN. I wrote this 11 years ago as an undergraduate.
The afternotes at the end of the post are worth reading; people have sent me various qualifications and corrections over the years.
> In essence, then, those ten days in 1582 never happened and simply do not exist within the Gregorian calendar system used almost universally in the West today.
I find these things so much easier to think about if you consider the change as a change from one calendar system to another calendar system. Those 10 days certainly exist, in both calendar systems, they just represent different points in time. I.e., I think it's easier to just consider both calendar systems as the rules, extended forward & backwards infinitely ("proleptic"). Some people switched from a Julian calendar to a Gregorian one in 1582.
"Some people did not experience days with these labels in some areas of the world" … I get where it's coming from, but it's not how I'd build a library.
If you worry about the switch, then you have to ask "which switch?" which TFA only lightly touches on. The 1582 one is famous, of course, but not everyone switched, and other parts of the worlds switched as time went on, to as late as 1918, when Russia switched.[1] (And you can see other messiness in that table, too.)
Needing to deal with it is niche enough that I think most language std libs should implement the proleptic Gregorian calendar, and let an application whose niche requires it deal with the switch (& whichever switch it requires).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adoption_dates_of_the_...
> Those 10 days certainly exist, in both calendar systems.
Not in the standard Gregorian calendar. Those dates only exist in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. The standard Gregorian calendar explicitly skips them. That's because you can't feasibly go back and change all the Julian dates that had been physically written down for centuries. That's why it's called the Gregorian "shift".
Messiness is an understatement :)
Thanks. I haven’t known that countries switched in different years.
Gregorian calendar is just one piece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_calendar
Eighteen countries use another calendar alongside the Gregorian calendar…
The article is a bit old. It should have noted a new development in calendar technology if it was written half a year later.
> In A.D. 1582 Pope Gregory XIII found that the existing Julian calendar insufficiently represented reality, and changed the rules about calculating leap years to account for this. Similarly, in A.D. 2013 Rockchip hardware engineers found that the new Gregorian calendar still contained flaws, and that the month of November should be counted up to 31 days instead.
https://lwn.net/Articles/669022/
> The Eastern Orthodox church even continued well after that, only switching to the Gregorian calendar in 1929.
Technically, they switched to the Revised Julian[0] calendar, not the Gregorian. Also, it was only some of the churches making up Eastern Orthodoxy that switched; others remain on the Julian calendar to this day, and all of them still use the Julian calendar to calculate the date of Pascha.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar
Fun related fact, many dates -- for example, birth dates on headstones -- of people born in countries observing Eastern Orthodox Christianity will have the prefix O.S. (old style) to disambiguate dates using the original Julian and either the Georgian or Revised Julian calendars which were in effect at that person's death.
A primary reason for the Catholic Church changing the calendar was to bring the date of Easter back into conformance with the decree of the Council of Nicaea on the topic. There was a controversy in the early Church on this, there were even miracles worked concerning the correct date -- see Dom Gueranger's "Liturgical Year" for some of the accounts.
There seems to be disagreement about the year. Two systems I checked assume 1752, not 1582.
(OpenBSD)
(Ubuntu Linux)It depends on the country.
1582 is Catholic Europe
1700 or 1701 is Protestant Europe
1752 is Great Britain and its colonies which include USA
1918 is Russia
1923 Greece
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_cale...
Which is one of the reasons that the Perl DateTime library just implements the proleptic Gregorian calendar (i.e. "let's just pretend we've always used Gregorian and the Julian calendar never existed")
agreed
This is clearly the wrong way to think about it. Dates forward and backward from this flag date exist in both calendars and it's straightforward to convert between them.
Such a flag day didn't involve removing days from one calendar or the other, it switched between them.
The way I imagine it is like the calendars are both rulers that are slightly off from each other. We were using one ruler, and at a certain point we went from using one to the other, so our "present" was never mapped to those dates. But you can represent any point in time as any of those calendars, like we can represent a specific temperature as Fahrenheit or Celsius. The calendars extend forwards and backwards to infinity.
I would think of it as Calendar A uses Calandar B until time point T and then uses Calendar C. These dates exist in Calendars B and C, but do not exist in Calendar A.
It's not a wrong way to think about it. There are some use cases for proleptic calendars, but there are just as many where it's completely inappropriate. If you ever need to compare what day you think it is with what day someone in the past thought it was, then yes those dates don't exist in any real sense.
I wouldn't say it's it's straightforward to convert between them, either. The Gregorian calendar was first adopted in 1582, but the UK and it's colonies didn't follow suit until 1752. Russia didn't convert until 1918, and Greece didn't switch until 1923. We're just over 100 years out from active use of the Julian calendar. So you have to know who the speaker is and where they are or where they are from to know what they mean.
Since these places switched at different times, they had to skip a different number of days. It was 10 in the 16th century. It was 13 in the 20th!
If you're reading a journal by a British man who lived in Russia through the end of the Great War and then moved to Greece in 1920, what does he mean when he's talking about a lunar eclipse he just witnessed?
I would say it's almost never appropriate unless you're directly quoting source texts.
If you are talking about a historical event from Egypt in 500 BCE, you would say "this happened in 500 BCE", not "this happened in year 26 of the 27th dynasty".
The distinction is important in the context of doing historical research, but it is no more appropriate to write dates in secondary sources using the Julian calendar than it would be to try to explain Egyptian history by spouting hieroglyphics at people.
Yeah, but how often are we talking about exactly specific dates without referring to specific historical texts?
The Magna Carta was sealed on June 15, 1215 for the Julian calendar. But if you want the actual anniversary, it was sealed on June 22, 1215 using the proleptic Gregorian calendar. Do you want to know the date people remember, ir the date of the true anniversary?
The coronation of Henry VIII is listed almost everywhere you look as June 24, 1509. Except that's also Julian. The date of the Gregorian calendar is July 4, 1509.
We don't remember the proleptic dates. We remember the dates that were then in use.
And if you say you're just always going to use the contemporary recorded date, that's fine. Until you get to dates like February 29, 1700. What do you put in your system then?
This is an interesting detail to learn about history. However, like the article mentions near the end, the Gregorian calendar was adopted at different times in different countries. The Anglican Church didn’t trust the Catholics, so Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750 ). And they did their best to hide the fact that they were adopting a Catholic invention: it’s the “New Style Calendar” and they came up with a different way to choose the same date for Easter.
1752 is late enough that Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others were born before that change.
I think that’s the reason that programming languages tend to adopt the proleptic Gregorian calendar and leave it up to the programmer to figure out when the calendar was adopted in the countries they care about.
Except that countries apparently had to answer various questions when they adopted the Gregorian calendar, and they didn’t all chose the same answers. Ideally, we’d have something like tzdb but for calendar adoption. But I guess the need doesn’t come up all that often.
1752 is before the invention of timezones, but that adds another curiousity about "what date did X happen?". On the calendar of Country A it could've been October 31, 1752, and on the calendar of Country B it would've been October 21...
The British (including the American colonies) also did an arguably even more confusing calendar change in 1752, by switching the start of the new year from March 25 to January 1.
Does that really mean that the day after 24 March 1750 was 25 March 1751?
I think so.
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year#Annunciation_Style :
“Despite the unification of the Scottish and English royal crowns with the accession of King James VI and I in 1603, and even the union of the kingdoms themselves in 1707, England continued to use Annunciation Style while Scotland used Modern Style. This led to the act being recorded at the time in England as 6 March 1706 (rather than 1707), because in England (unlike Scotland) it fell before the new year began (on 25 March).”
It apparently caused trouble for travelers (from the New Style Calendar Act https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750 ):
“WHEREAS the legal Supputation of the Year of our Lord in that Part of Great Britain called England, according to which the Year beginneth on the 25th Day of March, hath been found by Experience to be attended with divers Inconveniencies, not only as it differs from the Usage of neighbouring Nations, but also from the legal Method of Computation in that Part of Great Britain called Scotlond, and from the common Usage throughout the whole Kingdom, and thereby frequent Mistakes are occasioned in the Dates of Deeds, and other Writings, and Disputes arise therefrom.”
Although, I think “common usage” in that statement implies that it was common to just do what other countries did, except when filling out legal documents.
This whole story is built on one wrong assumption: that there are some clear rules defining calendar shifts. As the author discovers at the end this history differs in different countries, and what dates exist is not anymore easy to tell universally. But now let's recall countries are not the same anymore, so even ncal's admirably nerdy attempt to be precise is just a rough approximation. Then how about a Catholic town in a Protestant country, or vice versa? How about people using several calendars simultaneously for different purposes? The truth is there's no clear recipe for every case, and for ≈99.9999% cases proleptic Gregorian (which doesn't care) is completely fine.
In the systems that skip those dates, do they then correctly allow dates like February 29th 1500?
If not I'd argue the system should disallow dates before the switchover.
So, the Proleptic Gregorian Calendar[1] refers to what you'd get if you extended the current Gregorian Calendar back in time before its introduction. (It agrees with the Julian calendar only during the 3rd century AD.) Most date libraries use the Proleptic calendar for simplicity. Ruby's DateTime is unusual insofar as, by default, it actually switches to the Julian calendar for dates before Oct 15 1582.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proleptic_Gregorian_calendar
Using the proleptic Gregorian calendar for historical dates is only a problem if you want to compute the day of the week (which those missing days will throw off prior to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the relevant country) or the number of days between two historical dates (if the two dates span the date when the Gregorian calendar was adopted).
And, frankly, there are other problems to deal with beyond correctly handling the Julian/Gregorian switch. In Nelson's Navy, for example, the new day started at noon rather than midnight as we'd expect. AM could be June 1st, PM could be June 2nd, and both could be Tuesday.
And then there are lots of historical events with dates like "on or about August 6th" or "mid-September" or the "in the Fall of".
Trying to deal with historical dates in what a programmer would consider a perfectly correct way is something of a fool's game.
Dates really are a headache.
In our Dip (in house db) client library, we built what we called a policy that auto selects partitions based on every crud operations. The policies can be specified once for each collection in collections.json based on fields or query.
So for policies where partition involves the date type fields, be it range or fixed dates, it was incredibly hard to generate universal date names from ranges.
The policy mechanism was finished fairly quickly as Dip is inherently distributed first. But reasoning about date names was so incredibly hard.
The missing dates mentioned in the article did come up during development adding to the woes.
But the upside now is that application code no longer worries about the distributed partitions. Policy handles that. Some sort of architecture as code. Don't know whether AAC is an existing term or whether we coined it.
I tried to create a date object in Swift from the date October 5, 1582. The resultant date object was October 15th 1582.
This is (weirdly) in line with behaviour I've observed in iOS's date picker; if you set a block of dates as not available, and the selected date inside of that unavailable block, it will automatically select the first available date on open.
This article presents a grossly simplified version of events. The truth is that only some catholic countries switched in 1582. Britain and its colonies switched in 1752. Prussia switched in 1610. And so on.
Hadn't Britain established the C of E permanently by 1570, so it wasn't part of the Catholic world any more?
I wonder how many libraries correctly handles the date 1712-02-30 in the Swedish calendar (according to Wikipedia the only official 30th of February in history)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Feb...
Tried using ncal like in the examples in that blog post, but it did not work correctly using either Julian or Gregorian. Of course the Swedish calendar from 1700-1712 was neither, but somewhere in-between, because of the (failed) attempt to gradually move from one to the other.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Feb...
Meta: one can also link to this article, which redirects:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_30
But that redirect (intentionally or not) doesn't include the fragment part of the URL, so it might not have satisfied the other poster's intent.
Are we really supposed to trace this given how ancient it is? If we really want to do far we would eventually reach ancient Chinese emperor era names that even confuse historians
Is the stack trace in the Ruby transcript invisible for anyone else? It seems to show up as white text on a white background.
Yep. This post is really old, I probably broke the CSS for these older posts a long time ago and never noticed it. I can try and fix it later today.
... And then there was Sweden.
Instead of flipping the switch in the 1500s... or 1700s... they instead did a slow roll out until they finally flipped the switch and did a big leap.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/date-distinctions
I ran into this in a Ruby on Rails test suite a few years ago and wrote up my findings here: https://gist.github.com/abachman/f97806e1c0fe8e4e1849e5f8412...
tl;dr - ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone used absolute seconds counting to determine dates while DateTime used a proper Gregorian calendar. This means dates before October 15, 1582 have different internal values when compared.
The behavior showed up because a test was using a DateTime value to set a MySQL DATETIME column to the DB minimum value, which is 1000-01-01 00:00:00, and then comparing the DB record attribute to the original variable used to set it.
Something like:
I "discovered" the missing Gregorian dates when I wrote a loop counting forward in time from Jan 1, 1000 until the corresponding TimeWithZone and DateTime records returned true when compared with ==.I suppose the Georgian calendar includes this gap officially? Or did the catholic world just jump from system to system? If it includes the gap officially, then yea, error is the right thing. But if we just moved to a new calendar, then arguably there should be no error. both calendars work for all dates continuously, and we could have conversion functions etc. The gap is just a big flag day (week.)
imo, if i am using Georgian i want that system even retroactively, just like projecting a date back into the stone age. I don't care that a particular geography or culture changed calendars.
So I suppose what is really going on is that some libraries are using Georgian consistently, and others are using some hybrid "civic" calendar that tracks what the romans and the catholics were using, so dates in history books make sense.
Contracts and other similar types of financial instruments existed by this time there must be some way they handled it because something that said that it happened on a date that never occurred - sounds like what lawyers live for.
I’ll draft a Dubia so that when future popes change the calendar they will include a representative code sample and details about how we handle this.
(It’s important to remember that the pope and friends were operating much more like an international standards body than a religious leader when doing things like this.)
If a contract dated to the 4th October 1582 specifies you have 15 days to make payment, you would indeed need to know where that contract was signed to determine on what day that deadline expired.
And if there is a contract dated to the 6th October 1582, that does raise questions about its legitimacy (though in general misdating a contract does not void it, it would merely be one point of evidence in your argument that it's a forgery, just like using a particular font in a modern printed contract)
I was thinking of contracts that say "payment is due on 6 October" from before they knew the date of the change.
It's one of those "well technically" things programmers love to obsess over and the judge just says "everyone knows what was meant, stop being an idiot."
I assume there is a way to handle this in modern contract law. Surely people have forgotten how long the various months are and written contracts referring to April 31.
It's one of the reasons that they spell it out, or do things like "define what month is, and then the payment is due X months out" and not on a specific date.
> there must be some way they handled it because something that said that it happened on a date that never occurred - sounds like what lawyers live for.
Yeah there are a lot of examples of dates being written two ways on the same document/artifact. In the Anglosphere there are two changes that happened close together: the movement of the new year from Lady Day to the first of January, and the Julian/Gregorian calendar jump, so that confounds things slightly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates
The proper name for the calendar using the Gregorian system before the start of the Gregorian calendar is "the proleptic Gregorian calendar".
And indeed that's Python's calendar:
'A date object represents a date (year, month and day) in an idealized calendar, the current Gregorian calendar indefinitely extended in both directions.'
'This matches the definition of the “proleptic Gregorian” calendar in Dershowitz and Reingold’s book Calendrical Calculations.'
https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#id2 https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#id5
Whereas Ruby has proleptic Gregorian Time, but civic DateTime:
https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.6.1/libdoc/date/rdoc/DateTime....
Think it depends on usage? Taking October 1st and 20th, and you want to know how many days passed, what's the right answer? If it's days lived, you would want the answer to not be 20, as some of those days didn't happen. But in some other context (perhaps something transitioning to the calendar earlier), they did?
Regarding computers and time, I always liked that in AmigaDOS, you could specify custom relative times.
It would natively display "Future" if the file timestamp was ahead of the system clock, but you could also add dates. I remember seeing directory listings like
Dealing with dates becomes much simpler conceptually when you realize that you are actually dealing with two different ideas masquerading as one: dates, and the actual instants in time which they name. Instants in time can only be unambiguously referenced by measuring some fixed unit of time intervals from some commonly agreed upon event (e.g. seconds since the Unix Epoch).
Dates are a mapping from human-readable labels to instants in time; critically, this mapping is not a total function (there are dates that map to no instant in time in a particular calendar, such as October 5-14 1582 in the Gregorian calendar, or 2:30am March 8 2026 in US timezones due to DST), nor is it in fact a function at all depending on how you define your inputs (1:30am November 1 2026 in US timezones is ambiguous if you don't specify DST/ST).
Furthermore, the mappings (both for past dates and future dates!) can themselves change over time (changes to DST, timezones, and calendars such as in TFA), and you need to keep track of these changes in perpetuity, as well as at which instant in time they were implemented, and we don't necessarily have that information for some of these historical changes, we only have the date as written down, which itself can suffer from the ambiguity problem (is it the date pre- or post- calendar change?).
This makes dealing with past dates tricky, and dealing with future dates speculative at best. For instance, what's February 28th + 1 day? The answer depends on the calendar system and the year; we can answer it definitively for past years but not necessarily for future years (maybe in 2040 we'll move the leap day to December 32nd). This is why it's important to immediately convert past dates (and sometimes future dates, depending on the use case) to unambiguous instants in time, and only convert them back to dates for display purposes.
"Wednesday, August 12th 2026" and "8 days from now" are also semantically distinct for some purposes: if have 8 doses of a daily prescription left, I'm still going to run out in 8 days even if tomorrow the government decides to repeal the Gregorian calendar, thus changing the name of "8 days from now" from "Wednesday, August 12th 2026" to "Sunday, August 2nd 2026". My medication doesn't care what the government decides to call 8 days from now, I'm going to run out either way. The pharmacy, on the other hand, very much does care what the government decides to call 8 days from now, because perhaps they're closed on Sundays. The calendar change means that "8 days from now" went from being not-a-Sunday to a Sunday, affecting their operating hours.
It's really just another instance of one of the two hard problems in computer science: naming things.
I get what you're saying, but if the government repealed the Gregorian calendar (and went back to Julian) that wouldn't change the day of the week. The day of the week is historically independent of the day of the month. Catholics and Protestants agreed on this in the calendar change. The original papal bull that set up the Gregorian calendar has Thursday 1582-10-04 followed by Friday 1582-10-15; Great Britain and colonies (if we're taking the US perspective) followed Wednesday 1752-09-02 with Thursday 1752-09-14.
Interesting, I didn't know that! I suppose I could edit my post accordingly, maybe a better example would be "the pharmacy won't let me get a refill until the date written on my prescription: Wednesday, August 12th 2026"? I think the point gets across regardless.
Ok now do date math, does the day-of-month accurately jump over the non-existent numbers?
This "civic vs proleptic" split is a good use case for composite calendars: glue a few calendars together at their historical cut-over dates and the result behaves like one ordinary calendar.
I maintain an Elixir library (Calendrical) that does this. England, for example, is just three segments spliced onto a Julian base:
The "missing" days simply aren't valid dates, and stepping across the boundary jumps: