A Date With Tim Peters...

[Konrad Hinsen]

m.faassen at vet.uu.nl (Martijn Faassen) writes:

> I propose to retroactively introduce a year 0 AD. Just use the currently
> 1 BC for it and substract 1 from all BC numbers. Besides, we should be
> using negatives for BC anyway.

That convention is already used in some communities, for example among
astronomers, because it facilitates calculations substantially. And
there is no risk of getting confused with dates in historical
documents, because the AD counting system wasn't invented before 532
AD (which was commonly called year 247 of the reign of emperor
Diocletian at the time) by an abbot who published a table of the dates
of Easter for the next 19 years, and didn't want to put the name of
Diocletian on it, because this emperor hadn't been too friendly to
Christians. He thus figured out the year of the birth of Christ (and
appearantly got it wrong) and decided to call the following year 1 AD.
So if you ever see a document marked with an AD date before 532, it's
a fake, and even much later dates are not likely to be genuine because
the AD scheme didn't become widespread before the 10th century or so.

All this confusion gives a unique opportunity to those who'd like to
celebrate the new millenium several times, because there are so many
justifiable dates:

 1/ 1/2000:  first year starting with a 2
 1/ 1/2001:  first year of the third period of 1000 years in our
             current year counting scheme
30/12/2000:  2000 years after 1 AD  (don't forget that 1 AD was
             defined in the Julian calendar!)
14/ 1/2000:  start of the third millenium according to the Julian
             calendar counted from the "common era" (that's AD but
             counted from zero); this combination is popular in
             astronomy for its relative simplicity.
14/ 1/2001:  start of the third millenium according to the calendar
             that was used when the AD scheme was introduced (i.e.
             the Julian calendar)

And if that's not enough, just add all the non-Christian calendars.

All this is way off-topic... so in order to introduce a Python-related
content, I herewith propose formally to start the 9th Python
conference the 14th of January 2001 ;-)
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Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr
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