greg@sdcsvax.UUCP (Greg Noel) (09/27/84)
Y'shana Tova. (Did I spell that right?) I have been working on a program that keeps track of fixed, regular events and allows you to display them. For those of you who have used it, it is a C version of the PDP-10 "LESCAL" program. It uses a file of dates that you consider interesting, and has various ways of specifying dates so that "second tuesday" and the like can be given. It also has a number of "special-algorithm" dates for calculating things like President's day, bi-monthly paydays, and Easter. It does NOT have algorithms to calculate Jewish holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, or Hanukkah. I would like to amend this. Can somebody take pity on a poor Gentile and tell me if there is an algorithm that, given the year, will calculate the date of any of the holidays? If so, can someone send me the algorithm(s) or a pointer to it/them? I doubt that this topic is of great interest to the rest of this newsgroup, and I don't read it regularly anyway (lack of time, not lack of interest), so please reply via MAIL. As a last resort if you can't reach me by mail, post it to this newsgroup with "Calendar" in the subject line; through the magic of "rn" I will monitor this group for any such message. Many thanks. -- -- Greg Noel, NCR Torrey Pines Greg@sdcsvax.UUCP or Greg@nosc.ARPA
rib@edsel.UUCP (RI Block) (10/02/84)
I hate to discourage honest enterprise, but an 'anaylitic' conversion from solar (julian or gregorian civil) to lunar-Jewish dates involves lots of calculations. Jewish events fall at regular dates within the context of the jewish calendar, e.g. Rosh Hashana is always 1 and 2 Tishri, Pesach is always 15 Nisan. The complication is that there are 6 different year lengths made up of (leap [13 month] | common [12 month]) * (short|normal|long) years. The choice of leap or common years is determined by the position in the 19-year cycle, the choice of lengths made by deleting/adding days to two of the months. The nominal way to figure the calendar is to sychronize the month with the lunation, but in practice, one of four delay rules usually intervenes to guarantee, for example, that Yom Kipur never falls on Friday or Sunday. There are various citations in print and some netters have posted that they have programs that do the conversion.
raphael@crystal.UUCP (10/09/84)
I have a program that converts solar-Jewish. It is complex, as previous articles have pointed out. Mail me if you want a copy. Enjoy Sukkos. Raphael