On Fri, 21 Nov 2014 15:07:39 -0500, Denis Beauregard <denis.b-at-francogene.com@fr.invalid> wrote:
>On Fri, 21 Nov 2014 14:35:14 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber ><bieber.geneal...@earthlink.net> wrote in soc.genealogy.computing: > >>On Fri, 21 Nov 2014 10:35:19 +0200, Steve Hayes <hayes...@telkomsa.net> >>declaimed the following: >> >> >>>This Python script does it for me. >>> >>>year = input("Year: ") >>>age = input("Age: ") >>>born = year-age >>>print 'Year of birth:', born >>> >>>It's so simple, so elementary, that it's not really worth writing about, >>>except for the fact that it illustrates the KISS principle. >>> >> And it is wrong since it doesn't take into account the month. >> >> 2014 - 55 => 1959 >> >> But I was born in April of 1958, so any calculation done for >>January/February/March (and the first week of April) is going to produce >>the incorrect year (I /was/ 55 in January of 2014...) > >I made a lot of automated computations from census. In Quebec, we >have censuses for 1666, 1667 and 1681, and also ages in some marriage >records, marriage contracts, burials, and some more records. In >Acadia, there are other old censuses. > >Sometimes, the result is accurate, i.e. there is a known baptism >and the age is matching, but in many cases either the age is not >matching or the year of birth is changing a lot depending on the >record. So, if the computation is made to give a hint about the >birth year, then the month is irrelevant. The result will be >"about that year" and not "that year". In the database I sell, I >write exactly that, i.e. (actual example, from Acadian censuses) : > >Germain, born about 1650 (census 1671), 1652 (census 1686) (census >1693), 1650 (census 1698) or 1649 (census 1699) > >Marguerite, born about 1658 (census 1671), 1660 (census 1693), 1658 >(census 1698) or 1661 (census 1699) Exactly! In this kind of thing one is lookinng for a "ballpark" figure, not a super-accurate one. -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list