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Business Days

Often time is measured in "business days" or "working days," where weekends and holidays are skipped. Calc's normal date arithmetic functions use calendar days, so that subtracting two consecutive Mondays will yield a difference of 7 days. By contrast, subtracting two consecutive Mondays would yield 5 business days (assuming two-day weekends and the absence of holidays).

The t + (calc-business-days-plus) [badd] and t - (calc-business-days-minus) [bsub] commands perform arithmetic using business days. For t +, one argument must be a date form and the other must be a real number (positive or negative). If the number is not an integer, then a certain amount of time is added as well as a number of days; for example, adding 0.5 business days to a time in Friday evening will produce a time in Monday morning. It is also possible to add an HMS form; adding `12@ 0' 0"' also adds half a business day. For t -, the arguments are either a date form and a number or HMS form, or two date forms, in which case the result is the number of business days between the two dates.

By default, Calc considers any day that is not a Saturday or Sunday to be a business day. You can define any number of additional holidays by editing the variable Holidays. (There is an s H convenience command for editing this variable.) Initially, Holidays contains the vector `[sat, sun]'. Entries in the Holidays vector may be any of the following kinds of objects:

If the Holidays vector is empty, then t + and t - will act just like + and - because there will then be no difference between business days and calendar days.

Calc expands the intervals and formulas you give into a complete list of holidays for internal use. This is done mainly to make sure it can detect multiple holidays. (For example, `<Jan 1, 1989>' is both New Year's Day and a Sunday, but Calc's algorithms take care to count it only once when figuring the number of holidays between two dates.)

Since the complete list of holidays for all the years from 1 to 2737 would be huge, Calc actually computes only the part of the list between the smallest and largest years that have been involved in business-day calculations so far. Normally, you won't have to worry about this. Keep in mind, however, that if you do one calculation for 1992, and another for 1792, even if both involve only a small range of years, Calc will still work out all the holidays that fall in that 200-year span.

If you add a (positive) number of days to a date form that falls on a weekend or holiday, the date form is treated as if it were the most recent business day. (Thus adding one business day to a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday will all yield the following Monday.) If you subtract a number of days from a weekend or holiday, the date is effectively on the following business day. (So subtracting one business day from Saturday, Sunday, or Monday yields the preceding Friday.) The difference between two dates one or both of which fall on holidays equals the number of actual business days between them. These conventions are consistent in the sense that, if you add n business days to any date, the difference between the result and the original date will come out to n business days. (It can't be completely consistent though; a subtraction followed by an addition might come out a bit differently, since t + is incapable of producing a date that falls on a weekend or holiday.)

There is a holiday function, not on any keys, that takes any date form and returns 1 if that date falls on a weekend or holiday, as defined in Holidays, or 0 if the date is a business day.


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