[Ilugc] computerising the tamil calendar
- From: arun289@xxxxxxxxx (Arun Venkataswamy)
- Date: Sun Jul 11 17:00:44 2010
On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Kenneth Gonsalves
<lawgon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
hi,
this discussion came up in the Mumbai list - is it possible to computerise
the
tamil calendar so as to do date arithmetic on it?
--
It might not be possible to do date arithmetic using simple formulas.
This is because the Tamil calendar year "averages" 365 days for a year. The
length of the months vary from 29 to 32 days. Also the same month can have
30 days in one year and 31 days in another year. A new month begins with
"sankranthi" (the sun entering a new zodiac sign), but the complication is
brought in because of the fact that if the sankaranthi occurs after sunset
(6 PM) the month starts the next day and an extra day is added to the
current month.
We should be able to write a library to do date arithmetic on Tamil calendar
based on a look up table. Executing code to calculate sankrathi's for each
month might not be efficient. I guess we should decide on an epoch for the
library and run a table generator for a few centuries and package it with
the library. Interesting project.
I know a little bit of astronomy (not astrology!) math and am game to build
a library / or help a student if it will be of any use.
Arun
--
Arun Venkataswamy
http://arun289.wordpress.com
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