Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 00:14:33 +0100 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: Swerda <Swerda@aol.com> Cc: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: y2k Message-ID: <1224.890781273@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 24 Mar 1998 17:54:25 EST." <2363a99d.351839a3@aol.com>
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In message <2363a99d.351839a3@aol.com>, Swerda writes: >i dont believe 2000 is a leap year >a leap year is divisible EVENLY BY 4 >except NOT one divisible by 400 Wrong. from: http://www.bldrdoc.gov/timefreq/faq/q28.htm The year 2000 will be a leap year. Century years (like 1900 and 2000) are leap years only if they are evenly divisible by 400. Therefore, 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, but the year 2000 will be a leap year. To understand this, you need to know why leap years are necessary in the first place. Leap years are necessary because the actual length of a year is 365.242 days, not 365 days, as commonly stated. Therefore, on years that are evenly divisible by 4 (like 1992, for example) an extra day is added to the calendar on February 29th. However, since the year is slightly less than 365.25 days long, adding an extra day every 4 years results in about 3 extra days being added over a period of 400 years. For this reason, only 1 out of every 4 century years is considered as a leap year. -- Poul-Henning Kamp FreeBSD coreteam member phk@FreeBSD.ORG "Real hackers run -current on their laptop." "Drink MONO-tonic, it goes down but it will NEVER come back up!" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the messagehome | help
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