week starts at Sunday or Monday??

[Paul Hill]

Antoine Leca wrote:
> Hmmm... Historians disagree upon knowing if the Bible texts were written
> prior or after the establishement of the first Christian communities.

I'm not sure how this issue is related to the first day of week question.

May I humbly suggest that if you want to talk about the history of
the seven day week you might want to join the CALNDR-L mailing list.

That list wonders around in everything from symbolic meaning of calendars, to
algorithms for calculating various calendars, to histories of
any calendar anyone can find any information about.

see http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/calndr-l.html

This is not a request to use /dev/null, for I (and several other members
of the TZ list) are regulars over there also. I have personally been part of
7 day week discussions on that list.

It has been my opinion that the germane topic of the TZ list is tzdata and tzcode.
Discussions of general code related to reading and writing Time zones and dates
is also within the realm of this mailing list.

Numbering days of weeks is part of code, but what is the "right" day 1 is certainly
getting a bit of topic.  I personally expect any code that defines the days of the
week to define symbolic constants, so that I can use CALENDAR_MONDAY, or Calendar::MONDAY
or Calendar.MONDAY etc. depending on the language. Just working with numbers
is a sure formula for error.

cheers,
-Paul

-- 
Myriad Genetics: http://www.myriad.com/
Java FAQ: http://www.afu.com/javafaq.html (Section 9, Computer Dating)