Re: [boost] Date/Time formal review

From: William E. Kempf (williamkempf_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-04-26 08:37:16

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kostya Altukhov" <kostya_at_[hidden]>
To: <boost_at_[hidden]>
Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 6:00 AM
Subject: Re: [boost] Date/Time formal review

> William E. Kempf wrote:
>
> >That said... I'm not sure that parsing (reading) of dates should actually
> >strictly conform to any format string.  As long as the strings are never
> >entered by a human this works, but if you need to allow for human input
(and
> >can't constrain the input with something like a GUI formatted input
widget)
> >then the exact parsing becomes nearly useless.
> >
> I think that a strict parser based on format string will be useful even if
> more intelligent option is also provided. After all, input validation and
> date parsing are different tasks. In many cases at the time of parsing
> we are sure about the format of the input string, and in these cases I
> would prefer to rely on strict format parser rather than to trust some
> guessing algorithm.

Sorry, I did not mean to imply it was a one or the other choice.  What I
meant to imply was that a choice of only strict parsing is not acceptable.
A choice of only a more flexible parsing would at least cover more cases
(unless the point of parsing is to verify strict adherance then the flexible
parsing will work, although possibly less efficiently), but it's not what I
was suggesting.

Bill Kempf