After reading the recent discussion on Iranian Calendar and its support in .NET, I have a few suggestions:
- As the lunar calendar in Iran is observation based, there is no way to have an exact conversion for a date in future to/from lunar calendar. However, it is possible to do so for past dates. What I suggest is that the implementation SHALL convert dates precisely for past dates, and do a best guess conversion for future dates. Hence, the conversion algorithm (or a related resource) needs to be updated at most 12 times a year, and in case of Iran, only at the beginning of Ramadhan and Shawwal. This update could as well be propagated through a network protocol like NTP (Network Time Protocol). Also, the conversion shall try to conform to the official published Iranian calendar for future dates in the same year. For future years, it should calculate the lunar calendar using astronomical methods. - Mordad vs. Amordad. I have seen both in calendars, but I guess I do not count, as I have been out of Iran for a long time now! Anyway, I have only seen Amordad in day planners marketed at the higher end. So, in my opinion, Mordad or Amordad are both fine. Although I prefer to see Mordad myself. But, I think this should be a user option. And does not need to be implemented at the convesion level Omid is working on. - b.z vs. asr. I do not know the flexibility of the API, but it would be nice if we can have three designators, sobh, asr and shab. sobh is for 6:00 am to 11:59pm. asr for 12:00 am to 5:59pm, and shab for 6:00pm to 5:59am. The time ranges are not exact, but they are close to what you hear if you want to set appointments in Iran. - Jalali vs Iranian. I strongly prefer Jalali, as it refers to a spcific method of keeping dates regardless of the country it is used in. For example, if were still under Qajar rule or Pahlavi rule, then we would have either used Hijri-Qamari calendar or Shahanshai, still both would have been considered Iranian calendar. So, in a country which has recently changed its official calendar a few times, we better stick to a name that will be in place regardless of the government. I am under the impression that the current calendar is use is techincally Birashk's calendar. Birashk perfected the old Jalali Calendar (which had 33/128 year periods vs 33/128/2820 year periods of Birashk). - Birashk's book. He had published a book on his work, if memory serves me, it was called 'taarikh-tatbighi-ye Iran'. He had a few examples of different date conversions, using a rather large table for lookups. That table could be used as a test vector for the date conversion utility. I once did my own derivations to derive his table, and except one entry, my code and his table conformed. I never figured the source of the discrepancy. -- ODC PS. I hope no one gets offended by my chouce of pseudonym. _______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
