Re: Getting an era's beginning date

FROM : Clark Cox
DATE : Tue Jan 29 01:45:34 2008

On Jan 28, 2008 4:39 PM, 慧 松本 <<email_removed>> wrote:
> Hi, Nick
>
> On 2008/01/29, at 8:49, Nick Zitzmann wrote:
> > For days, weeks, etc. this is trivial, since they have a universal
> > start time. But an era can begin and end at any point in time.
> > These points in time are trivial to figure out on the Gregorian
> > calendar (the AD era began on January 1, 1), but the Japanese
> > calendar is a totally different story (the Heisei era began on
> > January 7, 1989 for example).
>
> I am a Japanese.
>
>  "January 7, 1989" is the date that our current emperor was
> enthroned. Each emperor had his own eras. Some emperors changed their
> eras when a disaster or evil thing had happened.
> As our imperial family has continued for more than 2000 years, there
> are hundreds of eras in Japanese calendar.
>
> I don't think it is realistic for NSCalendar to have Japanese era
> database.

But it obviously *has* such a database. How else would it know which
era to display when presenting dates to the user?

If I set the system clock to 1989.01.07, it knows that that was in the
Showa era, while if I reset it to the present, it knows that it is in
the Heisei era; so the information is *somewhere*.

> As our emperor's birthday is a national holiday, I know the date.
> But I don't remember the date when Heisei era began. :-)
>
> I am rather interested in Maya calendar that defines the date of the
> end of the world. :-)


--
Clark S. Cox III
<email_removed>