Datevid Letterman's stupid date trick...

In a current project (Today is June 9, 2004), a colleague of mine had to figure out which date a specific day was in a particular month. His particular problem went along the lines of: "If the third Sunday of March is a particular date do something, else do something else."

We went for a walk to take a break from a long day of non stop coding, and once he mentioned the little problem, I couldn't get it out of my mind.

He had already solved the problem doing some fancy counting, and since there are many ways to skin a cat, I thought of a general solution to solve the type of question "What date does the <first | second | ...> <Mon | Tues | ...> of <Jan | Feb | ...> of <any year> fall under?" - An example: What date does the second Sunday of May of 2004 fall under? (That's mother's day in North America).

So, if you ever wondered what date it was on the third Wednesday of July, 1972, wonder no more. Here it is, Datevid Letterman's stupid date trick: