History of Zero-based Months?

August 24th, 2022
history, tech
JavaScript is a language of many silly things, and one of them is:

> new Date()
Wed Aug 24 2022 ...
> new Date().getFullYear()
2022
> new Date().getMonth()
7
> new Date().getDate()
24

It represents 2022-08-24 as (2022, 7, 24). One-based indexing for the year and day, but zero-based indexing for the month.

In this case, however, the problem was copied from Java:

getMonth: The value returned is between 0 and 11, with the value 0 representing January.

getDate: The value returned is between 1 and 31 representing the day of the month.

I'd love to blame Java, but they seem to have copied the problem from C:

localtime(3):
tm_mday: The day of the month, in the range 1 to 31.
tm_mon:  The number of months since January, in the range 0 to 11.

Looking at the Unix History repo, the first mention of "month (0-11)" is in 1973's Research Unix V4:

The value is a pointer
to an array whose components are
.s3
.lp +5 5
0      seconds
.lp +5 5
1      minutes
.lp +5 5
2      hours
.lp +5 5
3      day of the month (1-31)
.lp +5 5
4      month (0-11)
.lp +5 5
5      year \*- 1900
.lp +5 5
6      day of the week (Sunday = 0)
.lp +5 5

While this may have been an original decision by Dennis Ritchie, it's also possible it was copied from an even earlier system. Does anyone know?

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, hacker news

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Animal Welfare and Capabilitarianism

All ethics is a special case of animal welfare science

via Thing of Things December 18, 2024

Developing the middle ground on polarized topics

Avoiding false dichotomies The post Developing the middle ground on polarized topics appeared first on Otherwise.

via Otherwise November 25, 2024

How to eat vegan on Icon of the Seas

Royal Caribbean has a new giant cruise ship, Icon of the Seas, which has a large selection of food options.

via Home November 21, 2024

more     (via openring)