hn • r/hackernews
Comment on: Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
Dealing with dates becomes much simpler conceptually when you realize that you are actually dealing with two different ideas masquerading as one: dates, and the actual instants in time which they name. Instants in time can only be unambiguously referenced by measuring some fixed unit of time intervals from some commonly agreed upon event (e.g. seconds since the Unix Epoch).Dates are a mapping from human-readable labels to instants in time; critically, this mapping is not a total function (there are dates that map to no instant in time in a particular calendar, such as October 5-14 1582 in the