rf15 22 hours ago

> Astronomers use the Julian calendar for years before 1582, including the year 0, and the Gregorian calendar for years after 1582

So what happens when it's 1582? (sorry, currently no time to articulate a good wiki fix)

1
skissane 20 hours ago

I think they use the original Gregorian cutover, in which 1582-10-04 is followed by 1582-10-15, and the dates 1582-10-05 through 1582-10-14 don’t exist.

However, in general, I think proleptic Gregorian is simpler. But in astronomy do what the astronomers do. And in history, dates between 1582 and 1923 (inclusive), you really need to explicitly mark the date as Gregorian or Julian, or have contextual information (such as the country) to determine which one to use.

1923 because that was when Greece switched from Julian to Gregorian, the last country to officially do so. Although various other countries in the Middle East and Asia adopted the Gregorian calendar more recently than 1923 - e.g. Saudi Arabia switched from the Islamic calendar to the Gregorian for most commercial purposes in 2016, and for most government purposes in 2023 - those later adoptions aren’t relevant to Julian-Gregorian cutover since they weren’t moving from Julian to Gregorian, they were moving from something non-Western to Gregorian

Large chunks of the Eastern Orthodox Church still use the Julian calendar for religious purposes; other parts theoretically use a calendar called “Revised Julian” which is identical to Gregorian until 2800 and different thereafter - although I wonder if humanity (and those churches) are still around in 2800, will they actually deviate from Gregorian at that point, or will they decide not to after all, or forget that they were officially supposed to

LegionMammal978 9 hours ago

It's frustrating when people just pick an arbitrary interpretation of old dates instead of actually looking at the context. Even beyond Julian vs. Gregorian leap-year rules, we also see historical variation in the start of the numbered year (January 1 vs. different dates in March). I'm not aware of any software that can represent all such dates as they appear in the primary sources: they always have to be translated through someone's manual effort, which can easily introduce misinterpretations. At least the day of week, when available, can help double-check a calendar assignment.