Calendar Software: Crossing Paths with an Old Friend

We heard from Peter Meyer the other day, which is noteworthy because we haven't heard from him for, well, a long time. In fact, the last time Peter crossed our path he was living in California, doing research in AI, and heading up his one-man software shop selling his Dolphin C Toolkit and Dolphin Encrypt. Peter also wrote the famously popular Dr. Dobb's article Julian and Gregorian Calendars.

Peter is living in Switzerland now, but continues to write calendar-related software (as well as security and other programs), although Dolphin has been replaced by Hermetic Systems. In the process, he has extended his original research into the Gregorian and Julian calendars by developing Chinese Calendrics, a program for converting between dates in various Chinese calendars and dates in the Gregorian and Julian calendars, and to find (among other things) lunar New Year's day and leap months for any year in the Chinese Calendar. Old habits (and old calendars) are hard to break.

Interestingly, calendar reform is still a controversial topic, even if only in specialist circles. As Peter reports, there were two attempts at calendar reform under the League of Nations and the United Nations, but both failed because the proposed reform interrupted the 7-day week cycle (5-day and 6-day weeks were tried in Russia, but were abandoned). So only a reform which preserves the 7-day week has any chance of acceptance.

After leaving California for Europe in 1994, Peter spent a few years in the U.K. as a research student, when he wrote a large program in C to perform simulation of magnetic material. A programmer at heart, he says that the fun part was writing the software; the subject itself (and performing lots and lots of simulation runs) was of less interest. Still, it got Peter an M.Phil (his thesis is available online). After that (and more travelling)he did a stint as a research assistant at the University of Queensland, again writing C code, in the area of machine learning. Followed by an extended ramble through Asia, then back to Europe, where he continues to make a living by marketing his software.

He's also come up with a programming language called EDC, which is short for "Easy Date Converter". EDC not only processes date operations sequentially, it also allows date operations to be performed based on "program logic". It thus implements a programming language, though not one with all the features of the better-known programming languages. We'll be posting more on EDC before long.

So good to hear from you Peter. Maybe it is about time to start on your next Dr. Dobb's article.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:56 AM  Permalink