In regard to dealing with dates outside 0000-9999:
For most usage I guess we go with ISO8601 (no scheme)
(It's perhaps unfortunate that this doesn't accomodate
"high school" dates like 49BC.)
For other usage, specify a scheme. From a bit of digging I did,
it seems that Julian Day (JD) and Modified Julian Day (MJD) are used by
various astronomers, historians etc. for ease of arithmetic.
See e.g. http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/hermetic/cal_stud/jdn.htm
http://www.fi.aau.dk/~tn/calendar.html
http://www.cs.tulane.edu/www/htdocs/emacs/emacs_33.html#SEC284
(Calendar mode in emacs includes Julian, Hebrew, Islamic
conversion from Gregorian)
You can't just give a naked date before 1927 without specifying which
calendar it's in (or where it's from, which lets you figure it out)
Andrew Daviel
TRIUMF & Vancouver Webpages
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