Stuart McLachlan
stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Sat Oct 18 21:02:59 CDT 2003
On 18 Oct 2003 at 19:24, Henry Simpson wrote: > Agreed. I can see no justifiable reason for the arbitrary cut off of > negative date values below: > > ?cdate(-657434) > > How did they choose that magic number when the range of potential numbers > for a double range down to over 300 digits and not just part way through 6. > > Those who face the need to catalog Egyptian artifacts would probably resort > to string representations of dates even though they might want to estimate > life spans of pharoahs and calculate contemparaniety between the two. Generally for that sort of thing, people use Julian dates See: http://www.aavso.org/observing/aids/aboutjd.shtml or http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/JulianDate.html -- Lexacorp Ltd http://www.lexacorp.com.pg Information Technology Consultancy, Software Development,System Support.