Re: Re: format-date() and negative (BCE) dates

There is one scale of time that is free of all issues with the
counting of years around zero and local interpretations: Julian Day
Number. It is very convenient for calculating intervals of all
granularity. (You may not need Julian Day.)

-W


On 07/05/2014, Martin Holmes gtxxgm-xsl-list-2@xxxxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 14-05-06 04:16 PM, Michael Kay mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>>
>> On 6 May 2014, at 23:53, Martin Holmes gtxxgm-xsl-list-2@xxxxxxxxxxx
>> <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> Consider this BCE date:
>>>
>>> -0001-12-29
>>
>> This date is in fact ambiguous. In ISO 8601, and in XSD 1.1, this is
>> the date two years before 0001-12-29. In XSD 1.0, it is the date one
>> year before 0001-12-29.
>
> You're right. In my encoding, in fact, it's a Julian date. I'm not sure
> how to say that when passing it to the xs:date constructor. To
> complicate matters further, one of the things I'm trying to do is
> conversion between Julian and Gregorian, and it helps to do date
> arithmetic with the date functions, so I usually construct a date with
> xs:date from the Julian (which is slightly evil but still) then do the
> arithmetic to get a Gregorian date-range which is roughly equivalent.
> Most of my dates are not BCE, of course, so this oddity took me by
> surprise.
>
>> XPath 2.0 refers to XSD 1.0. XPath 3.0 allows the implementation to
>> use either XSD 1.0 or XSD 1.1.
>>>
>>> If I format this using the "AD" (Gregorian) calendar, like this:
>>>
>>> format-date(xs:date('-0001-12-29'), '[Y0001]-[M01]-[D01]', (),
>>> 'AD', ())
>>>
>>> I get an invalid date:
>>>
>>> 0000-12-29
>>>
>>> There is no year zero in the Gregorian calendar. I get the same
>>> results using OS (Julian). What am I doing wrong here? The ISO
>>> calendar does have a year zero. If I include the E (Era) component
>>> in the picture string, I do get "BC", but I don't see why the
>>> correct negative-one year is being changed to an incorrect
>>> zero-year.
>>>
>>> This is using Saxon 9.4 (the one distributed with Oxygen 15.2).
>>>
>>
>> I think Saxon tries to do this according to whether or not XSD 1.1 is
>> enabled. But it's likely to be not very thoroughly tested.
>>
>> The statement that "there is no year zero in the Gregorian calendar"
>> is inaccurate.
>
> I was basing my statement partly (shame) on Wikipedia", but also on the
> XSLT 2.0 spec, which says:
>
> "When referring to years occurring in antiquity, modern historians
> generally use a numbering system in which there is no year zero (the
> year before 1 CE is thus 1 BCE). This is the convention that should be
> used when the requested calendar is OS (Julian) or AD (Gregorian)."
>
>> I don't think the papal bull which is the normative
>> specification of the Gregorian calendar made any statement on the
>> matter (though I admit I haven't consulted it, and my Latin is
>> probably not good enough to make much sense of it anyway). Historians
>> generally use the Jullian calendar when referring to events prior to
>> the introduction of the Gregorian calendar. The only definitive
>> statement I know of that extends the Gregoran calendar into the past
>> is ISO 8601, and this states that there IS (or WAS) a year zero.
>
> The proleptic Gregorian doesn't, I agree, make much sense when it's
> extended this far back, but the project I'm working on is an early
> modern one, and most of our date-conversion functions convert between
> Julian and Gregorian. Older dates tagged as Julian also come in for the
> same conversion. You're right that it's ambiguous, though; this page:
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proleptic_Gregorian_calendar> shows a
> table in which 1BC Julian is equivalent to 1BC Gregorian, but it also
> appears to suggest that ISO 8601 is somehow equivalent to proleptic
> Gregorian.
>
> But my assumption was that if I pass a negative year into a format-date
> function telling it to use Gregorian (or Julian), I would get back the
> same negative year. I guess what's really happening is that I'm passing
> a Gregorian date into a function and it's giving me back the ISO
> equivalent. If that's what you think is happening too (i.e. it's not a
> bug in Saxon, and the zero year is what I should be getting, then I'll
> have to wrap it and trap for <=0 year off-by-one errors.
>
>
> *"Year zero does not exist in the Anno Domini system usually used to
> number years in the Gregorian calendar and in its predecessor, the
> Julian calendar." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_%28year%29>
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
>>
>> Michael Kay Saxonica