A classic problem in numerical date notation is that various countries list year, month, and day in different orders, which was one of the motivations for the introduction of the ISO-8601 date element and interchange formats (Randall Monroe has a nice summary in this xkcd comic). In the upcoming release of the Wolfram Language, we’ve added built-in support for these ISO date formats:

The ISO specification also provides some alternative date representations, such as week dates (year, week of year, and day of week) and ordinal dates (year and day of year):

In addition to the ISO-8601 formats, we’ve added two new numerical representations of time to the Wolfram Language, UnixTime, which gives the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC, and JulianDate, which gives the number of days since November 24, 4714 BCE, 12:00:00 UTC:

UnixTime is a variation of AbsoluteTime, which gives the number of seconds since January 1, 1900, 00:00:00 in your local time zone; however, one important difference is that the output time zone is always in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is one reason it’s frequently used for time stamps. FromUnixTime takes a UnixTime value and returns a corresponding DateObject:

JulianDate is frequently used in astronomical calculations, such as in the following approximation of SiderealTime:

The Wolfram Language has a built-in (higher resolution) SiderealTime function, which I can compare with the approximation above:

JulianDate can also be useful in representing many simple calendar systems, such as the Egyptian solar calendar, which has 365 days in every year, twelve 30-day months (plus one 5-day month), and no leap years. You can use the following function to get an Egyptian calendar date (which uses February 18, 747 BCE as its epoch date):

As a quick sanity check, I’ll put in the epoch date to verify I’m getting the correct results:

And the inverse operation is simple: just add the years, months, and days to the epoch, and FromJulianDate constructs an appropriate DateObject expression:

Once again I can verify our formula by using the calendar epoch:

And I can do the same with a more recent date, such as Today:

This works with any representation of dates in the Wolfram Language:

These are just some of the uses for the new date and time features in the Wolfram Language. Once available, share your examples through Wolfram Tweet-a-Program or Wolfram Community! Stay tuned!