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Subject:Re: Another thing about 2000 From:Tom Tadfor Little <tlittle -at- LANL -dot- GOV> Date:Wed, 31 Jan 1996 11:42:58 -0700
John Wilcox wrote:
> The addition of an extra day (oops, there's a superfluous modifier) every
> four years to correct for the fact that a day is slightly less than 24
> hours long results in a tiny overcorrection. So supposedly each year
> that is divisible by 400 is NOT supposed to be a leap year. In spite of
> this, a zillion programs have been written to use the standard leap year
> algorithm. Simply to avoid patching so many programs, I suppose 2000
> will indeed be a leap year. Have you heard anything definite?
Actually, it works like this:
Years divisible by 4 are leap years,
EXCEPT for century years (which are not leap years),
UNLESS they are divisible by 400 (in which case they are leap years).
So 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, 2000 will be, 2100 will not be,
and so on.
I'm waiting to see how many calendars are printed up wrong during 1999.
--
Tom Tadfor Little tlittle -at- lanl -dot- gov -or- telp -at- Rt66 -dot- com
technical writer/editor Los Alamos National Laboratory
