Are these limitations...

[Guy Harris]

	Would  the  STRUCTURE  of  the  tm  structure  have  to  be
	changed  to accommodate the solar  time/lunar  calendar or the
	oriental  calendaring systems?

It depends on whether you want to use "struct tm" to hold calendar
dates in other systems or not.  It may be possible (e.g. with a scheme
like the one used to represent calculations in "terminfo" strings) to
write formatting strings that will convert values from a "struct tm"
into dates in various Oriental calendars.

	Are there weekdays in oriental?  We may need to indicate the
	epoch somewhere (for the reign of the  Emporer or  whatever).

>From what I saw on my trip to Japan, it seems that the only
difference between Japanese and Western dates/times is that the year
is given as years since the year in which the current emperor
took the throne, along with the name of his reign.  I.e., "now" is
(modulo some transposition of fields) Sunday, 22 Mar, Showa 62 (if I
remember correctly, last year was Showa 61), 6:08 AM.  (Courtesy of
"TZ=Japan /usr/src/bin/date" - thanks, Arthur!)

	Hebrew  used the fall of Adam,

Is the past tense deliberate here?  What calendar is currently used
in Israel?

	However the Oriental calendar uses assension of the emperor.

Or "Oriental calendars use".  The Japanese calendar does so; what
does the current Chinese calendar do?  (I think the Soviets changed
to the Gregorian calendar after the revolution; what happened
post-1945 in China?)

	That means things change every so often.

Yup.  This means you can't guarantee that you can convert times in
the future correctly.  I'm not sure how the Japanese talk about the
year 2087; "Showa 162" would sound a bit presumptuous to me.  They
may just punt and use the Gregorian calendar here.