Philip Newton's conlang blog

I decided to rename “WHAT”, the Western Hellenic Alternate Timeline, to “WHATL”, the Western Hellenic Alternate TimeLine, on my blog, following a suggestion on the CONLANG mailing list.

The basic problem is that “WHAT” is nearly impossible to Google for, since it’s such a common English word. Hopefully, this renaming will ameliorate the situation.

I’ve been considering what to do about the date of Easter in Rhaetia, since there’s no official word about how WHATL does it and I think the Julian-Gregorian algorithm is extremely complicated.

I think I may just have it always be on the 14th of Ξανθικό, regardless of the day of the week (a different kind of Quartodecimanism…).

When I mentioned that to Stella, she seemed a bit shocked and said that Easter had to be on a Sunday, that it was very symbolic and you couldn’t just move it around the way you could, for example, Christmas. In which case my fallback plan is to have Easter always fall on the third Sunday in Ξανθικό, which will fall in roughly the right period but will stop all that faffing around with Ecclesiastical New Moon and stuff.

“The first Sunday on or after 14 Ξανθικό” might also be an option.

So I tried to make a little program that would convert Gregorian dates to the equivalent WHATL dates.

The first version only used the current date; then I wrote one which would parse a date or a time_t value on the command line. After messing around with it, I eventually got it to work – and found that it gave wrong results in leap years.

Apparently, it was off by one. I had used code from Zefram’s Stardate program, and apparently that assumed that the epoch was 0001-01-01 rather than 0000-01-01.

What annoyed me, too, though was that it only worked during the time period where gmtime() and friends work – on my system, until early 2038.

And since WHATL years and Gregorian years are the same length nearly always (by a fortunate coincidence), you can simply convert from one to another by adding or subtracting four to the year and a certain bias to the date (which depends on the month and whether it’s a leap year or not, and varies between 6 and 9). So I wrote a second version which did that.

After a bit of playing around with that, I think it more or less works now. Pity that I can’t output month and day names in Greek, though (it’s a C command-line program and my command line is not Unicode-aware).

Perhaps I’ll write a Java program or something, though I’m not sure how to integrate it into Java’s existing i18n framework. Presumably a subclass of Calendar and one of DateFormatSymbols. But I don’t see any way to tell DateFormat to use a different calendar, and even SimpleDateFormat can only be passed separate DateFormatSymbols. Where does that leave people using different calendars? Somehow, I think that it’s only half-baked. Perhaps IBM’s ICU will be more amenable.

Or I could just forget about them and just write a little class of my own, which will not have as many features and may have a different interface, but does work with my dates.