Apparently a camouflaged attempt to instigate a denial of service attack against several of the more popular on line dictionaries and possibly search engines also.
Declining to participate, I cannot tell if "astonishres" is a typo or just another example of my limited vocabulary. I also wonder what dataset names have to do with dates and calendars and why the epoch origin should be 1 and not 0. Why would astronomical or geological efforts require doublewords? Has anyone ever seen any time value larger than 5 million years which requires granularity down to the day? month? single year? -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of john gilmore Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2011 8:37 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Date representations: Y2k revisited I have been bemused by the Ewing-Gilmartin debate on date representations. It recapitulates en petit a good many of the jejune Y2k discussions of the past, complete with their defenses of the indefensible and their characteristic crackpot realism. Perhaps even more seriously, it omits to distinguish between o internal date formats suitable for computation, and o external date formats, suitable for display to humans or printing. External formats vary from culture to culture. Even within the Anglo-American community 'September 2 1925' is universally intelligible but '2 ix 1925' astonishres many Americans. Internal date formats are much simpler and not at all controversial among coloro che sanno. Choose an epoch origin, the putative birth date of Jesus, that of the Moslem hegira, Scaliger's -4713 January 1 BCE, whatever; give it the serial number +1, its predecessor days the serial number 0, -1, -2, . . . , and its successor days the serial numbers +2, +3, +4, . . . Whatever your choice, conversion to someone else's choice is trivial; a single addition|subtraction suffices. Using DSNs trivializes calendar arithmetic. Moreover, the conversions o DSN to <somebody's calendar> o <somebody's calendar> to DSN are easy too, although they should be encapsulated in subroutines written by a calendrical-arithmetic specialist (for the same reasons that a sqrt subroutine should be written by an approximations specialist). DSNs represented as signed binary fullword values encompass an interval of 5,879,610 Gregorian years on both sides of the epoch origin chosen, which is adequate for most practical purposes, but not for geological or astronomical applications, for which signed binary doubleword values are required. Why are these four-byte internal date representations not in wide use? Everyone who knows enough about calendars and dates to have a right to an opinion agrees that they should be used exclusively. Why then has this rare consensus been systematically ignored by the unwashed? The usual suspects, sloth and ignorance, decisions made by people unqualified to make them, are, I suppose, sufficient to explain this avoidance of DSNs. There is probably no need to invoke the resources of that science the Italians call dietrologia to identify a villain. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
