One of the things that became obvious in the Y2K discussion groups by
1999 was that the general public is not very good at understanding leap
year exception rules, especially ones that neither they, nor several
generations of their ancestors, have ever witnessed. It ran all the way
from some adamantly claiming 2000 should not and would not be a leap
year to some insisting there would be two leap days in 2000! As noted,
2000 was indeed a leap year by the 400-year exception to the 100-year
exception
Encyclopedia Britannica is complicit in the confusion to this day by
incorrectly implying in their "Leap Year" entry that in addition to the
divisible by 4, 100, 400 rules there either is or should be a 4000-year
exception rule:
"...For still more precise reckoning, every year evenly divisible by
4,000 (i.e., 16,000, 24,000, etc.) may be a common (not leap) year",
Over 18 years ago (Nov 1996) EB acknowledged that no such rule exists:
it was an un-adopted and sub-optimal suggestion by Sir John Herschel
around 1820. EB has apparently not yet followed their own internal
recommendation in 1996 "to reword this statement in the future".
Joel C. Ewing
On 08/11/2015 10:31 AM, Mike Schwab wrote:
> As a multiple of 400, 2000 was a leap year. 2100, 2200, and 2300 will not
> be.
>
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 10:08 AM, Jon Butler <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Did she realize 2000 was not a leap year?
>>
...
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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