Talk:Holidays related to Easter: Difference between revisions

: It's horribly complicated as it's ''usually'' the Sunday of the weekend after Passover, but is calculated using different rules to those specified in the Torah. And it's been the subject of a number of major fights in the Christian church (e.g., the Council of Nicaea). So I searched around and ended up using the code at the end of http://www.assa.org.au/edm.html (which I ''think'' is based on doing the switch to Gregorian rules using the British date; you should be able to confirm from the tables higher up that page) as that at least gives the same days/months as that deeply impenetrable ALGOL code for the dates in the exact challenge. –[[User:Dkf|Donal Fellows]] 10:34, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

:: http://www.assa.org.au/edm.html describes several different (and apparently conflicting) methods for determining when easter is. Although the page itself claims to describe how to do this for dates from 326 onward, the code at the bottom of the page is claimed to be accurate for years 1583..4099. (Many -- but not all --european countries [[wp:Gregorian calendar#Adoption|switched]] from the julian calendar to the gregorian calendar between easter in 1582 and easter in 1583.) Given the historical issues here, I think the task should explicitly specify how they are handled (or, perhaps, specify a date range which excludes the conflicts). As it stands now, implementations which do not specify multiple easters in some years necessarily fail to recognize some easters and this is complicated by the fact that the same "date" in different calendar systems will necessarily represent different physical dates. --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] 18:34, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

 

::: I just changed ''brief'' operators to '''bold''' operator for readability. I hope it helps.

:::: For example: http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/estrdate.htm#MEDC -- for the year 2011, easter falls on April 11 and April 24 where in the year 2000, it fell on April 17th, April 23 and April 30. And things are much simpler now than they were in the past... --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] 02:20, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

::: Well, all that I can really say for sure is that the code is probably wrong, but both the Algol and Tcl examples are wrong in the same way. (I know they're wrong because when I put in the day of the week, things are all over the place before the switch to the Gregorian calendar; that's an area where I'm pretty sure that the Tcl time formatting engine is correct; the guy who wrote the modern implementation is a ''serious'' time geek.) Given the massive uncertainty over calendars, I suggest not worrying about it. As noted, it's been a point of contention for the church for a long time even without programmers involved. –[[User:Dkf|Donal Fellows]] 09:33, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

<br>I was thinking of adding a Python calculator for future easters that relied on the random module :-)<br>--[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 13:07, 5 July 2010 (UTC)