Subject: Re: (i18n 51) Alternate calendars [was: Japanese profile]

From: Erik M. van der Poel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 90 22:37:29 +0900

>  2- In regards to "We don't need %E since we have %Y" :
>    The definition of %Y [and %y] implies the Gregorian calandar:
>    "the year with[out] century as a decimal number". In Taiwan, the
>    calandar is dated from the "republic" (~1925?) and doesn't HAVE a
>    century number.

I think it's 1911. Can anyone confirm this?

Anyway, when it is 2011 in the Gregorian calendar, it will be 100 in
Taiwan, so they will "have" a century number. Similarly, in the
Gregorian years 0-99 they "had" a century number, didn't they?

(By the way, the fact that you said that "The definition of %Y [and
%y] implies..." is not such a good sign; specifications shouldn't
"imply", they should *specify*.)

>     In most of the North African countries, for example,
>     BOTH types of dates are almost always printed, on calandars, newspapers,
>     etc.

OK, I just had a look at a Japanese newspaper, and indeed it also has
*both* the Japanese year and the Western year printed on the front
page. So you could be right -- we may need to support more than one
year format in the locale.

Now, as proof of concept (or just for fun :-) let's see if we can
express the year, as printed on the newspaper that I just checked,
using Sekiguchi-san's Japanese locale example.

The newspaper prints the year as

	HEISEI 2 NEN (1990 NEN)

where the "HEISEI" and "NEN" are Japanese Kanji. (I didn't think it
would be wise to try to send JIS X0208 (16-bit Japanese) data via
email. :-)

Clearly, the "HEISEI 2 NEN" part is %E. And the "1990" part is %Y.
However, there does not seem to be a way of getting the "NEN" after
the "1990" using (the X/Open extended version of) the POSIX.2/D10
specs.

We could solve this problem by adding a new format to the LC_TIME
specs -- y_fmt, to be accessed through %z (or whatever), and defined
as "%Y NEN" in the Japanese locale.

My, oh my. Aren't we having fun. Or is this just absurd?

>      In the North African countries, there are usually two (and sometimes 3)
>      types of dates printed

Sometimes 3, eh? So maybe we need to add another letter to the list.
How about %Y, %E and %J? What, 3 is too many? Well, isn't 2 too many,
then? No? Oh, OK, I see: You're trying to define a *reasonable*
standard. :-)

> 	%Y for the [Japanese] representation of the Gregorian year
> 
> ----   Matt Caprile	  phone : +33 7639 7752   fax: +33 7639 7518   ----

You probably mean %z. :-)

Erik