Re: Parser Interface (Was Re: Picking up the ball)

[Matthew Simon Cavalletto]

On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 02:51  PM, Dave Rolsky wrote:

On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Matthew Simon Cavalletto wrote:

What's the benefit of making this distinction between core and "other" formats?

Because "core" parsing would be available simply by doing:
  use DateTime;

We can move the parsing to format modules and load them automatically.

It's really a question of whether or not users must load another module to do parsing, that's all.

The suggestion on the table is that even the "core" parsing be placed in another package, but that this be transparent to end-users.

   my $dt = DateTime->new( ICal => '20030113' );

   # Causes DateTime to load the ICal format module and request that
   # it parse the data and return it in a standard numeric form.

Actually, I have some ideas for this. [...] the parsing modules would just add methods to the DateTime namespace.

Ick -- what's the advantage of doing it this way?

It strikes me as a lot more logical to keep those methods in their own namespace and simply call them when needed.

Looking at the two alternatives, does the second really seem clearer?

use DateTime;
my $dt = DateTime->new( 'MySQL' => $mysql_dt );
print $dt->to_string( 'MySQL' );

use DateTime;
use DateTime::Parse::MySQL;
my $dt = DateTime->from_mysql_datetime( $mysql_dt );
print $dt->to_mysql_string();

-Simon