Re: Fun With Dates -- Need Help

On 18 Jan 2025 14:00:26 GMT, Stéphane CARPENTIER wrote:

 

As a consequence, the Unix "cal" command defaults to
Sept 3, 1752:

 
The explanation is easy to understand: like you, the UNIX founders
believed that the USA is all that exists. They had, like you today, very
narrow minds. And the rest of the world struggle because of it.
>

Not quite.

The digital computer was invented in Britain and America, and for
a long time thereafter it was only the USA that produced computers.
English was the natural choice for the universal computing language
just like English is the choice for the global navigation language.

Unix began in 1969 and at that time hardware was limited in its
capability.  That's why we have ASCII because if there are only
7-bits for character representation it may as well be only English
characters.

But representing all human languages in digital form is not
a trivial undertaking.  First there were many ISO code pages
for various language groups.  Then, at the late time of 1991,
Unicode was established.

Could you have done better?

Ha, ha!  You can't even program "Hello World!" in BASIC.

 
established