On Wednesday, October 26, 2011 01:54:22 Stewart Gordon wrote: > On 25/10/2011 22:22, Jonathan M Davis wrote: > <snip> > > > At minimum, as I understand it, C, Java, python, and Ruby all have > > similar date/time formatting facilities and use mostly the same flags > > for date/time formatting. > > If they're only _similar_, it isn't really a standard. Indeed, it seems to > me a potential cause of confusion if these systems, with the same same look > and feel and mostly the same format specifiers, have subtle differences. > Moreover, how do these APIs deal with an unrecognised format specifier?
I have not looked over them in detail, but from what I've seen, they're _very_ similar - as in they took the C format specifiers and followed them in almost all (and maybe even all) cases but added a few of their own. But slight differences between them alone don't merit creating a whole new way of formatting dates and times. > > There's a lot to be gained by doing something standard and so any > > major > > > > deviations from strftime need to be solid improvements over strftime for > > them to be acceptable. > > My system is both much easier to remember and more extensible than strftime. > Does either of these constitute a solid improvement? I have yet to look over your API in great detail, but from what I saw, it looked like _all_ alpha characters were considered flags, whereas strftime uses % to distinguish flags from other characters, just like printf and writeln do. I'll look over your API in more detail, but I would consider that a deal breaker if that's what it does. There may very well be other things that you've done with it which are worth drawing from, but I fully intend to use flags like strftime does. Not doing so is unduly restrictive to what you can put in a format specifier. It should be possible to put arbitrary strings in the format specifier just like you would with printf or writeln. - Jonathan M Davis