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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> A big issue is that people couldn't finalize any changes until the new era name had been decided and announced, which happened just a few weeks ago on April 1.

How many different ways were dates marked "Heisei" displayed? I suspect it would actually be easy to finalize changes using a placeholder string, and just update to the actual era name when it was announced.

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Deploying a one-character change is still a deployment that requires effort and time to do and verify - ensuring that every system that you run, and every library that those systems depend on, and every library those libraries depend on have done and deployed that one-character change.

You think a one-character change is such a major project that there's just no way to get it done inside of a month?

Because every other part of the change can be implemented without reference to what the era name happens to be.

How do placeholders work in languages where you are forced to assign lengths to variables?

Not a Problem in this case, the era is always a single character, a newly formed ligature of two kanjis.

The code point was already reserved in unicode 11.0, so you could even just the unicode code point.

The real world is not so perfect. I never see Heisei or Showa, or earlier reigns as a single character. The Japanese are also not fully onboard with Unicode so there's an extra level of effort needed if you want to get into a normalized form.

>The real world is not so perfect. Perfect summation. Curious how this will also impact other consumers of Japanese data.

For this specific question, I strongly suspect that whatever the length of your Heisei string is, it's safe to assume that the new era string will be the same length.

Then it looks even harder. How do we handle it if our system doesn't support Unicode 11.0? Is platform upgrade only option?

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