Wording problem in man cal

Wording problem in man cal

[Felix Neumann]

Hi,

in the man page for cal there's a small wording problem in section "bugs":

       cal program uses the 3rd of September 1752 as the date of the
       Gregorian calendar reformation -- that is when it happened in Great
       Britain and its colonies (including what is now the USA).  Ten days
       following that date were eliminated by this reformation, so the
       calendar for that month is rather unusual.  The actual historical
       dates at which the calendar reform happened in all the different
       countries (locales) are ignored.

If you type cal 9 1752, you get this output:

   September 1752
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
    1  2 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30

Between Sept 2 and Sept 14, eleven dates are jumped; so the man page
should read something like "eleven days following Sept 2 were
eliminated"; in my opinion the current wording suggests there is a
date "September 3rd 1752", which is contradicted by cal's output..

I checked the man page on
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/cal.1.html as well as my CentOS 6
installation.

Best regards

Felix

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Re: Wording problem in man cal

[Benno Schulenberg]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2015, at 16:33, Felix Neumann wrote:
> Between Sept 2 and Sept 14, eleven dates are jumped; so the man page
> should read something like "eleven days following Sept 2 were
> eliminated";

True.  Upcoming patch fixes that, worded a bit differently.  Is it okay?

The ten days were elemininated when the reform happened in 1582;
when the reform was done much much later, eleven days needed to
be eliminated.  See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform#Julian.2FGregorian_reforms

Benno

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