So I'm starting to work on turning Date::ICal into DateTime.pm. The first step was a global search and replace. That part went well, and I was very proud of myself. I felt like a super-hacker ;)
Then I started added some of the simple-to-add Time::Piece methods, like day_of_year, hms, ymd, and so forth. All good. There's a couple of thoughts I wanted to bounce off of people before I go too much further. Please take a look at the Time::Piece API if you're not familiar with it. First of all, the Time::Piece API was intended to be something suitable for objects that would replace the value of Perl's localtime() builtin. I think it carries some unnecessary baggage because of that. - There are a lot of _very_ similarly named methods that differ _only_ in whether they return a 0-based number (for day of the week, for example) or a 1-based number. In other words, there's wday, which treats Sunday as 1, and _wday/day_of_week, which treat Sunday as 0. Is this _much_ API a good thing? I'm inclined to say no, since whenever I use Time::Piece I simply _never_ know which method to use, because I can't remember which is 1-based, and which 0-based. And I use Time::Piece a lot! Can we simply declare 0-based as the standard for day of week and day of year, and 1-based for day of month, month of year, and week of year. FWIW, that's what Date::ICal already had implemented, I believe. Alternately, how about names like "day_of_week" and "day_of_week_1" or something like that, so its _really_ clear what each does? - A similar confusion exists between methods that return numbers and those that return strings. This is obviously only an issue for days and months. Time::Piece has the following: month/monname - abbreviated name (Jan Feb ...) fullmonth - full name mon - 1-12 _mon - 0-11 wdayname/day - abbreviated name (Mon Tue ...) fullday - full name wday - 1-7 _wday/day_of_week - 0-6 The fact that month returns a name while mon returns a number makes little sense to me. I propose the following: month - 1-12 month_name - full name month_name_abbr - abbreviated name day - _day of month_ (makes sense in context of year() and month() methods) day_of_week - 0-6 (or 1-7, see earlier question) day_name - full name day_name_abbr - abbreviated name I think this makes more sense than the Time::Piece API. The "name" is the full name, not the abbreviation. If you want the abbreviation, ask for it. Also, I'm fine with have aliases like day_of_week/wday and day_of_month/mday and so on. But I do want to have a sensible, consistent method naming scheme for getting numbers, full names, and abbreviations. And yes, I realize this all needs some sort of localization scheme. I'm leaning towards stealing the Date::Language code from Date::Parse right now, since that'll be needed if the base object includes Date::Parse-style parsing anyway, and moreover we need it for strftime. -dave /*======================= House Absolute Consulting www.houseabsolute.com =======================*/
