[WP 34S] Julian day number conversion bug

[Paul Dale]

I seem to remember that we decided to not support negative dates because the calendar is pretty weird around and before year zero. It was put in place only a little prior in 45BC. The Julian calendar doesn't have a year zero but astronomers do. The presence of leap years pre-zero are also somewhat ad-hoc.

Currently, conversions of dates take the absolute value of their argument. This is probably the wrong thing to do but it seemed like the best option at the time.

What is best here? There is no correct which would be my usual aim.

I could limit JDN conversions to after the year zero which seems suboptimal or I could lie about the Julian calendar's reach back in time and ignore the strange stuff.


- Pauli