It's more like each calendar system maps the time to some completely arbitrary function. So in one calendar system, the number of years between 2000 and 2014 is

It's more like each calendar system maps the time to some completely arbitrary function. So in one calendar system, the number of years between 2000 and 2014 is 14 years, and the distance between 1990 and 1991 is 1,000 years. But at least with calendars it might be manageable. We want to do operations like find the lowest number of bits needed to represent some data, or to do comparisons between the complexity of different strings. If this varies based on the programming language you use, then it's problematic at the very least.