Year 300 bug in ILE RPG or ...?

[bvining@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Richard,

Excellent current analogy of a historical event (hope you don't mind if
I use it in the future).

Mani,

What historically happened was that the Julian calendar was a wee bit
large in that it had every 4th year being a leap year (no century check).
This caused the Julian calendar to set the average length of a year to
365.25 days, which is somewhat longer than the mean length of the
tropical year.  As the Julian calendar was instituted on Jan 1 45 BCE
(Julian) (Jan -44 Gregorian) this had the effect that the date of
the spring equinox, by the 16th century, had shifted from March 21 to
March 11.  As the date for Easter depends on the spring equinox, this
basically meant Easter was "floating" and would, if not corrected end up
migrating throughout the entire calendar year.  Pope Gregory XIII was
not amused...

To correct this situation, Pope Gregory "simply" declared that the day
after Oct 4 1582 (Julian) was Oct 15 1582 (Gregorian); and to avoid this
situation in the future added the century checks which cause the average
length of a year to now be 365.2425 days.  Note that this average length
is still not "exactly right"; but the error is very, very small now.

Bruce Vining

>
>Mani:
>
>If your watch is losing 10 minutes per day and you reset it one hour
>ahead on the sixth day, how do you account for the 'missing' hour?
>
>All the Gregorian calendar did was 'reset' the date so that the
>equinoxes and solstices would fall on roughly the same date each year.
>--
>Richard Rosenbluth
>

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