Re: [HC Evolution] Introduction

[Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>]

Ali Abdin wrote:
> It would be very hard (impossible) to design a GUI over two functions
> (time_t -> native and native->time_t) so you would need some sort of (xml?)
> file that defines the months, the number of days in months, the number of
> months, etc etc. But Russel Steinthal convinced me this is not really
> necessary :)

Perhaps you guys are all over this, but anyone who is thinking about
supporting non-Gregorian calendars should have completely absorbed
everything that Ed Reingold has written on the subject.  A web site
about his book is here:
http://emr.cs.uiuc.edu/home/reingold/calendar-book/

A predecessor to that book is online, and is incredibly informative:
http://emr.cs.uiuc.edu/~reingold/calendar.ps
http://emr.cs.uiuc.edu/~reingold/calendar2.ps
http://emr.cs.uiuc.edu/~reingold/calendars.shtml

He wrote the Emacs calendar package, and it supports lots and lots of
different calendars in a sane way.  And -- bonus points -- it's already
GPLed, so you can cut and paste to your heart's content.  (I imagine it
would be trivial to port it to another language; he's done it several
times, including Java, but seems to have licensed these other ports
under a "non-commercial use only" license.)

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz jwz org             http://www.jwz.org/
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