Re: Stand-Alone lunar calendar

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

> We can define an arbitrary number of months per year, an arbitrary number 
> of days per month. You can also of course customize the names of the 
> days/months. These will be store in an XML file for each 'type' of 
> calendar. I believe that the 'time' system should be ignored (e.g. the 
> default time on the system) cos no calendar (to my knwoledge) effects 
> time :) Since this is a lunar calendar (which ihs usually non-English 
> languages) how do we 'internationalize' strings in an XML file? This is 
> one thing I don't know how to do - Anyone got a clue?

XML can be internationalized, but I don't remember exactly how.  
E-mail Daniel Veillard if you can't figure it out, I guess.

However, an XML format is going to be insufficient, I think... The 
number of days in a Hebrew month, for example, is not constant from 
year to year.  While there is a perpetual calendar table-based lookup 
system, it's not easily reducible to a  division by months, than 
number of days type algorithm.

I'm fairly sure that to be done right, for most (if not all) systems, 
we are going to have to use an API which calls custom code to do the 
conversions.

As an example of the type of code which could be used, I'm sending my 
Hebrew date conversion code (in C++) as the next message to the list. 
 It should be at least reasonably understandable to non-C++ 
programmers, and would obviously be translated to C if it were folded 
into gnomecal.

-Russell