Alexander Belopolsky added the comment: The proposed interpretation of nonpositive years is not arbitrary, it is a natural extension of the same formulas that we use for positive years. On the other hand 1-9999 limits are arbitrary. If we wanted to restrict calendars to 4-digit years we would limit years to the 1000-9999 range.
Note that interpreting year 0 as 1 BCE is not without a precedent. ISO 8601 standard does exactly that with the caveat that "values in the range [0000] through [1582] shall only be used by mutual agreement of the partners in information interchange." Furthermore, "an expanded year representation [±YYYYY] must have an agreed-upon number of extra year digits beyond the four-digit minimum, and it must be prefixed with a + or − sign instead of the more common AD/BC (or BCE/CE) notation; by convention 1 BC is labelled +0000, 2 BC is labeled -0001, and so on." See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Years> citing ISO 8601:2004 sections 3.4.2, 4.1.2.4 and Annex B.1.1. Furthermore, documenting the existing limits is not an easy task. For example >>> from calendar import * >>> cal = TextCalendar(1) >>> cal.prmonth(1, 1) January 1 Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 displays 6 days in December of 1 BCE as blanks. Similarly itermonthdays() and itermonthdays2() generators yield objects corresponding to these days. Are these days within the calendar limits or not? Note that I am not proposing to extend the range of the datetime.date objects. Doing that would be a much more difficult task, but defining calendars for out of range years as those for year % 400 is trivial and much easier than to figure out and document the edge behaviors. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue28281> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
