4 ms·

There is the Holocene calendar which adds 10,000 to the year. The current year would be 12022 HE. It has advantages that gets rid of BC/year zero confusion and

• kragen 5y ago
  To me this seems like using the Unix time convention but changing the epoch time from midnight UTC to midnight at UTC-12:00, the timezone of Baker Island: it's close enough to produce confusing ambiguity (is "2020" or "02020" intended to mean two years ago, or an estimated date when Jericho's pre-pottery Neolithic A wall fell out of use, suggesting an abandonment of the site?), and it makes it more likely that your software will have untested cases with bugs in them. In the case of the Holocene Calendar the bugs would just be a question of negative dates; in the case of UTC-12:00 it would be a nonnegative epoch time that is nevertheless in 01969 instead of 01970, which will only happen if someone adopts a more westerly timezone like UTC-13:00, pretty much guaranteeing you won't test that case beforehand. (Samoa did something similar in 02011, but it was in the other direction.) Of course, as other people have pointed out, you shouldn't use fixed-width date fields in your software.