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I ran ncal -p to print the switching days from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar, and I see this:

 AL Albania        1912-11-30      IT Italy          1582-10-04
 AT Austria        1583-10-05      JP Japan          1918-12-18
 AU Australia      1752-09-02      LI Lithuania      1918-02-01
 BE Belgium        1582-12-14      LN Latin          9999-05-31
 BG Bulgaria       1916-03-18      LU Luxembourg     1582-12-14
 CA Canada         1752-09-02      LV Latvia         1918-02-01
 CH Switzerland    1655-02-28      NL Netherlands    1582-12-14
 CN China          1911-12-18      NO Norway         1700-02-18
 CZ Czech Republic 1584-01-06      PL Poland         1582-10-04
 DE Germany        1700-02-18      PT Portugal       1582-10-04
 DK Denmark        1700-02-18      RO Romania        1919-03-31
 ES Spain          1582-10-04      RU Russia         1918-01-31
 FI Finland        1753-02-17      SI Slovenia       1919-03-04
 FR France         1582-12-09      SE Sweden         1753-02-17
 GB United Kingdom 1752-09-02      TR Turkey         1926-12-18
 GR Greece         1924-03-09     *US United States  1752-09-02
 HU Hungary        1587-10-21      YU Yugoslavia     1919-03-04
 IS Iceland        1700-11-16

Notice: LN Latin 9999-05-31. What does this mean? Why is it in the future? Why is it specifically on May 31, 9999? What is "Latin" (it's certainly not a country)?

Flux
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    Latin Isn't just Julian calendar? It doesn't exist a two-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code for Latin, LN is ["Indeterminately reserved"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2). – Pablo A Mar 13 '20 at 05:06
  • @PabloA Are you sure? According to the table in your Wikipedia link, `LN` is "Unassigned". – Flux Mar 13 '20 at 10:22

1 Answers1

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This is a table that is hardwired into the ncal program. Wolfgang Helbig updated it in 1998 to add this entry. The update description listed this as one of four added countries, but did not say whence M. Helbig got the idea that this was a country. (This datum did not come from Claus Tøndering's Calendar FAQ, note.)

Almost certainly it was to accommodate people who had set xx_LN locales for whatever reason. ncal determines which record in this table applies by comparing the two-letter code with the LC_TIME locale name that it reads from the C library.

FreeBSD had had a la_LN locale since M. Helbig added it (also in 1998) until 2015 when FreeBSD switched to using the Common Locale Data Repository as its source for locale information. It seems that M. Helbig's idea was that people who had chosen to configure their sessions as if they were still living in the Roman Empire, would still be using the Julian calendar until at least I Kalendarum Iunius ZZZZMCMXCIX. ☺

JdeBP
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