On Fri, 13 Oct 2000 22:58:35 +0300 (EEST), Hristo Iliev wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
<snip>
>> October 1582
>> S M Tu W Th F S
>> 1 2 3 4 15 16
>> 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
>> 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
>> 31
>> The calendar above is ordered according to pure bull, by official edict of
>> Pope Gregory XIII.
> When I try "cal 10 1582" on my Linux the result is
> October 1582
> Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
> 1 2 3 4 5 6
> 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
> 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
> 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
> 28 29 30 31
> So if (for example) 31 Oct 1582 was Monday - is there a bug with this
> program (cal), and maybe with any other program like it ?
> Hristo
Hello Hristo:
>From the point of view of all good Roman Catholics, your program is
heretical. The calendar I have posted above is correct for October 1582
according to the decree of Pope Gregory XIII. For political reasons the
protestant countries did not adopt the Gregorian Calendar at the time.
Eventually all countries under the Christian sphere of influence came
to understand the sense of making adjustments to their calendar. The
longer they waited to apply the correction, the greater became the amount
of the correction to be applied. The English adjusted their calendar in
1752. There are a few countries that did not adjust their calendars until
the 19th and early 20th centuries. An adjustment was needed because the
old calendar system, called the Julian Calendar, was already obsolete
after it was discovered that the Julian Calendar was based on a somewhat
inaccurate calculation for the length of the year. The error was
cumulative. By October of 1582 the error amounted to a period of 10 days.
Pope Gregory XIII decided to correct the problem simply by erasing 10 days
from October of that year and by introducing a change in the rule whereby
leap years are assigned. To erase the 10 days from October 1582 he
decreed that October 4th of that year would be followed the next day by
October 15th. When the various protestant countries came around to
adjusting their calendars, they applied appropriate corrections at the
time so as to bring their calendars into conformity with the Gregorian
Calendar. The corrections were not applied retroactively. The calendar
your program has produced is correct for protestants, but wrong for
Roman Catholics.
All the best,
Sam Heywood
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