1.7.9 : date command fails for year 1900

[Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E]]

Keith Christian sent the following at Monday, January 23, 2012 2:00 PM
>
>> cygwin sent the following at Sunday, January 22, 2012 3:39 PM
>
>On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 10:23 PM, Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E]
><BBuchbinder@niaid.nih.gov> wrote:
>> /c> cal 9 1752
>>   September 1752
>> Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
>>        1  2 14 15 16
>> 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
>> 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
>>
>> Is this a bug?
>
>Not a bug, see: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/gregorian1.html.

Just for the record (and my self-respect), that was a rhetorical
question.  (Or was it sarcastic?)

9/1752 was the transition only for Great Britain and its
dependencies.  See Wikipedia for other places.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Adoption>
(I especially like Alaska, which combined a changed calendar with
a shift of the International Dateline.)

So (rhetorical) questions for the OP would be how to fix
  -  date and cal so that they properly take into account changes to
calendars in different locations.
  -  date to account for leap seconds.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_epoch#Encoding_time_as_a_number>

Also, the OP asked why a signed long integer.  See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#Representing_the_number>

- Barry
  Disclaimer: Statements made herein are not made on behalf of NIAID.

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