To say months shouldn't be used is sort of like saying that complex numbers or vectors shouldn't be used. They are absolutely useful. We just deal with their component parts separately.
To say months shouldn't be used is sort of like saying that complex numbers or vectors shouldn't be used. They are absolutely useful. We just deal with their component parts separately.
In some cases you can take "a month from now" to mean the same calendar day of the next month. This leaves what a month from January 31 means ambiguous, and also dependent on when the duration starts.
You can take an easier route and say that a month is 30 days. Still, the duration is ambiguous because it depends on when it takes place (i.e. an interval), because of summer/winter time adjustment. You can say that it's 720 hours, but that's still dependent on the start of the duration because of leap seconds. In the end, the only way to describe a duration unambiguously regardless of its start time is with seconds. There is no such thing as a well defined duration for any other unit of time.
Complex numbers and vectors are not a good analogy.
The mapping from "month" units to "days" units is well-defined. It's just some function that happens to be non-constant over the month ordinal.
Heck, if we start down the "precise time definition" rabbit hole, though, then neither does "day" have some philosophically unassailable notion, cf. leap seconds. Even the unit of "second" ends up pulling in a whole heck of a lot of physics machinery just to nail down some semblance of rigor.
Anyway, despite being such an intuitively simple and practically functional concept, the notion of time amd time measurement turns out to be suprisingly subtle and to have a fascinating history. I highly recommend jumping down that rabbit hole. Hehe
Anyway, I'm surprised calc.exe doesn't calculate with and store dates using some kind of epoch time.
Edit: except when giving an approximation, which the program doesn't