[boost] Re: reminder about Date/Time formal review

From: David Moore (jdmoore99_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-04-24 05:14:12

I vote "YES" for inclusion in Boost contingent on having at least a design
for the following:

1.  iostream based reading and writing of date and ptime, -INCLUDING- some
form of explicit formatting.  Parsing date and time strings is currently
very difficult, and I would love to eventually use boost::lexical_cast to
get from "23:56" or "2002-03-02" to a date or ptime.

2.  A better example, or built in support for business day calculations.
Once Easter and the other "hard" holidays are in there, I will be adding
"size_t business_days_between(ptime start, ptime end);" to my personal
library, if it's not in GDTL.  It wasn't clear to me how to intersect a
complex set of distinct days (the holidays, and all of the weekends) with a
simple date_period.

Other comments:

I'm hopeful that the final version will work "out of the box" for VS6SP5 by
avoiding the int64 types automatically based on <boost/config.hpp> settings.

Once we have boost::socket, automatic time setting/comparisons from network
time sources will be nice, too!

Leap seconds, astronomical timekeeping, etc. I'll leave to the judgment of
the domain experts.  My needs are much more in the [1900-2100] neighborhood
of things.

Local vs. Universal time - I tend to agree that local conversion is
something that's typically done -near- input and output, and that universal
time is a better internal representation.  The real danger is that you can
have one ptime object holding the time 01:00:00 UTC, initialized via
second_clock::universal_time(); and another holding the time 01:00:00 EDT,
initialized via second_clock::local_time().

Overall, there's a lot to like here, so thanks to Jeff for a great effort in
getting GDTL to where it is today.

Regards,
Dave

"Darin Adler" <darin_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:64EA8EAA-554E-11D6-BE76-0003935B80A2_at_bentspoon.com...
> Just a quick reminder that the formal review period for the Date/Time
> library runs through Wednesday, April 24.
>
> If you've already commented on the library, please make sure that you
> said specifically whether or not you think the library should be
> accepted by Boost. Often people make extensive comments, but don't
> include their overall recommendation.
>
> Currently, I have comments from less than ten people, and very few clear
> yes/no votes.
>
>      -- Darin
>
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