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:

Against Lyman Stone On Animal Welfare

Demographer Lyman Stone writes:

via Thing of Things March 21, 2025

Product in the age of AI

We’re seeing AI features pop up in every product we use. Slack, Google Drive, etc.

via Home March 18, 2025

How I've run major projects

focus • maintain a detailed plan for victory • run a fast OODA loop • overcommunicate • break off subprojects • have fun • bonus content: my project management starter kit

via benkuhn.net March 16, 2025

more     (via openring)