Alternative disposition of comments on date issues for Ecma 376

Regarding its treatment of dates, the Ecma 376 specification is inconsistent with ISO 8601, specifically with respect to dates before 1900, and with its treatment of 1900 as a leap year. Ecma's proposed disposition has complicated the problem, because it has been proposed that dates be stored in one of four, rather than two, distinct formats, keeping the old formats for the purpose of compatibility with previous functionality.

We propose an alternative disposition which is much simpler, adequately resolves all related comments, and is also able to reproduce the 1900 bug whenever required, thus also preserving compatibility with previous functionality.

Download the document (316 KB PDF, 19 February 2008).

(Archived draft 4, 14 February 2008; draft 3, 11 February 2008; draft 2, 4 February 2008.)