Pancanga_program

[yanom at ksuvx0.kyoto-su.ac.jp]

Dear fellow Indologists,

As a token of my appreciation to Domink's REFLECTIONS
I would like to make another contribution to our
precious discussion group of Indologists (in Dominik's
sense, of course).

It was about four years ago that I began writing a computer
program of Indian PaJcaanga (traditional calendar consisting
of five parts, namely, vaara, tithi, nakSatra, karaNa, and
yoga) in order to facilitate the comparison of various kinds
of PaJcaangas which I intended to collect in India.
The program was based purely on the Suuryasiddhaanta and no
elements of modern astronomy were used except trigonometrical
functions. With the help of one of my students, M. Fushimi,
a program which represents the Suuryasiddhaanta farirly well
was finished.  I distributed the first version to some of my
friends who were interested in converting the Indian date
into the Western date and vice versa.

There seem to be various kinds of calendar conversion programs,
but they are mostly based on modern astronomy using modern
constants. They give very correct results, but my aim was
different.  I wanted to have calendars of the ancient India as
might have been prepared by the ancient PaJcaanga makers by 
means of the Suuryasiddhaanta. I found the program is quite
useful when one wants to check the historical date in Sanskrit
sources.  Please note that it was NOT written for the purpose
of casting horoscope for modern people. 

I put the second version of the program at the ftp site of my
university: ccftp.kyoto-su.ac.jp
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in the directory:  pub/doc/sanskrit/pancanga
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by the name:

pancang2.uu
~~~~~~~~~~~
pancnag2.pas
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pancang2.uu is an uuencoded form of pancang2.exe which you can
run on IBM and its compatible machine. Just ftp the .uu file
as an ordinary text file and then decode it on your PC by some
uudecode program (like uudx).
pancang2.pas is the source file to be compiled by TurboPascal
version 5 or above.
I appreciate if you use our program to check the historical
date and send me some comments.  

Michio YANO
Kyoto Sangyo University