Erik Auerswald wrote: > Eric Blake wrote: > >>>If the astronomical term is what you want, then maybe you really > >>>do have a format that cannot be expressed in any existing > >>>notation, and maybe it really is worth burning a % notation. But > >>>how common is the Astronomical Julian Date in shell programming? > >> > >>I instinctively turned to 'date' for the full Julian date for > >>astronomical purposes, but I concede that this is not an > >>incredibly common use case. > > I'd say that 'date' is the natural program to try for date > manipulations. ;-) > > GNU systems are very useful in scientific settings, IMHO adding full > Julian date in the astronomical sense to 'date' further enhances > this.
I will just say that when I played with amateur astronomy one of the first things I did was write conversion routines to convert to and from the Julian Day Number. I wasn't writing in shell so it wasn't something that 'date' would have helped me with doing. But in astronomy it seems like one of the fundamental operations. I don't know if there are many astronomers that program in shell though since the shell is limited on high precision math. But it would probably be a useful program generating timestamps for example. Bob
