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But didn't all those different astronomical cycles start from zero when the world was created?
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kmoorevs wrote: Why someone would choose Julian is beyond me
Either they're working for the orthodox church, living in the autonomous province of Mount Athos or they just f***ed up.
Possibly all three at the same time.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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I apologize if I'm too dense or too nerdy: I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with storing a date as a float.
A 4-byte float value has 3 bytes for mantissa giving 2^24 values that can be correctly represented. That makes almost 17 million days or almost 46000 years. I'd argue that this is decent range for most general purpose applications.
It might be unusual or not keeping with established rules, but is not breaking any (computer) law.
Mircea
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It's simply not a date, and every time you'll have to use it you either need to cast it to a date (performance bottleneck) or you need to know exactly how it's formatted, etc.
It'll also be a matter of time before you get 20201005.00000000003 because it's still floating point arithmetic.
Or perhaps someone will enter 1 or 2020931, who'll say as there are no validations.
I'm now assuming the format of yyyyMMdd, but maybe it'll be days since [some date], like JavaScript and Linux do.
Perhaps people will use a local date, such as 05102020 or 10052020, good luck working with that.
Now let's say the float contains ISO dates in the form of yyyyMMdd and the date is 20201029, now add 7 days, good luck!
All in all, it's a lot of trouble, ambiguity and simply disaster waiting to happen.
If you really need dates that do not fit into any SQL date type, use separate integers for year, month and day, I guess.
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Quote: I'm now assuming the format of yyyyMMdd
I see, you are talking about those dates, with random number of days in the month. Sorry, but in that case the cartoon bubble should have said "Officer, he is using vaguely defined dates!", and yes, that should be a punishable offense.
The only well-defined timestamps are those based on a definition like "the number of <somethings> from <origin>". In case of dates can be "number of days from noon, Jan 1st of 4713BC" (Julian date) or "number of days from midninght, Jan 1st, 1970" (Unix time). Notice that in this case fractional parts have a natural meaning (fractions of a day). For good measure, don't forget to add a meridian so we know exactly what "midnight" means.
Mircea
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Sander Rossel wrote: It'll also be a matter of time before you get 20201005.00000000003 because it's still floating point arithmetic.
Agreed, one has to use decimal.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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Quote: Agreed, one has to use decimal.
"Captain's log, stardate 41153.7" Yes, it's decimal 
Seriously speaking you should tell that to all astronomers who use fractional days on a daily basis (sorry, couldn't abstain from the bad pun).
Mircea
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To me, that is a matter of software design philosophy.
A date is not a float, it is a date. So it should not be stored as a float but as a date.
I also shiver at old C, where you coded an infinite loop as "while (1) ...". A logical value is not an integer! And weekdays are Monday, Tuesday, ... Sunday, not integers 0..6 (or 1..7).
Some tools force you to handle data values as being of a different type/class than they are from a semantic point of view. We'll just have to accept that - and wrap it up so that you see as little as possible of that misleading, "wrong" type. (Even in K&R C, you could #define true and false.) If e.g. a database system does not provide a proper Date value, you may be forced to convert it to some acceptable representation when written, and back when read. Your application code should never see that, but treat it as a date type/class.
Couldn't your database write/read wrappers convert dates to/from floats? There is a principal difference between measuring and counting. Would you store NumberOfApples as a float, too? Days are discrete, countable units. They should be treated as countable values, not as measurement values. They should be integers (whether a day count from a given zero, or a multi-field year-month-day value), or, if this is not feasible, as a closed set of string values (e.g. as an ISO 8601 string). But not as a measurement value!
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Quote: Days are discrete, countable units.
Except when they aren't: right now in Sydney it's October 6 while I just started October 5th; the October Revolution started on November 7th and I could keep giving examples of time weirdness. In the words of Dr Who (and he is a Time Lord, so he should know something about that), time is a "big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff"[^].
As you said, apples are countable objects and behave like that. Time, for historical and astronomical reasons, was counted in different ways. Sometimes after 0228 you get 0229 and sometimes you get 0301. The fact that after 59 you get 00 (and sometimes after 23 you get to 0) goes back all the way to ancient Babylon.
The only reasonable way to keep track of time is as a measure on a long, continuos axis that has some fixed origin. The actual origin and the unit increment on the axis may depend on your application but that's all it is to it.
Mircea
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: the October Revolution started on November 7th
Because of Julian vs Gregorian Calendar
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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trønderen wrote: A date is not a float, it is a date. So it should not be stored as a float but as a date.
Actually, DateTime in SQL Server IS stored as a float.
Microsoft has realized how silly this is and has deprecated DateTime and recommend the use of DateTime2 instead.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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I assume you know that Excel, Access, and even SQL Server uses floating point numbers to store date and time values.
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Excel and dates is terrible.
Haven't used Access, but I can only assume it's the same.
To say SQL Server saves dates as floating point numbers is a bit simple.
It may do so, but then there's probably a ton of code to make it work like a datetime 
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Why do they call those food servers waiters, when it's the customers who do the waiting?
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Boy, isn't that the truth.
There is a restaurant chain in the U.S. named Ruby Tuesday, and they consistently make you wait 45 minutes to get the food after you order.
You have to eat before you go there so you don't die of hunger waiting for the food. 
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Hint...they're pushing the salad bar. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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That is an interesting theory. I hadn't thought of that.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Ask your broker...
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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In India, in my younger days, they were called as 'servers'. In fact, there is a movie in Kannada language, named "Server Somanna" (where Somanna is the server's name).
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As I do every once in a while, I fired up the weather app built into Windows 10 this morning to have a quick look at today's forecast. I was greeted by a small dialog box saying Microsoft had updated its licensing terms, and presenting two buttons, Learn More and Continue (or Ignore...I forget already). I hit the latter and carried on. Typically the Learn More button would load some page showing the entire EULA. No way I'm gonna bother reading that, even though a part of me was curious as to what it is exactly they've changed.
Then I got thinking: What apps with changing Terms of Service need is a Differences screen, like Visual Studio does when you're about to check code into a source control system. That is, present the previous and current versions side-by-side, but highlight the parts that are different. I'll bet a lot more people would actually read them if presented in that way. I know I would.
But, no doubt nobody's ever going to do that, since the current method allows them to slip in more and more nefarious items over time that would otherwise be placed into the spotlight.
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I think if you understand your rights under fair use, then you don't need to look hard at EULAs unless you're looking for something specific (like "more" freedom).
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: I think if you understand your rights under fair use,
Fair use is one thing, but I'd still rather proactively be made aware of what claims are being made in the EULA.
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And you would do what? Not accept at that point and wait until they got back to you? Having information and doing something with it are 2 different things. And there's the reading time, etc. A net loss situation.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: And you would do what?
Not saying I would do anything. Just saying I want to be aware of what's changed, for the sake of being informed. If I have to re-read the whole thing--then I just won't bother.
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That's what is being counted on...
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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