Okay. At the moment, the time point types in std.datetime have functions for converting to and from strings of standard formats but not custom formats, so functions for that need to be added. I've come up with a proposal for how they're going to work and would like some feedback on it.
Originally, I was going to make them work like strftime and strptime, since it was my understanding that those functions were fairly standard among various programming languags. And it _does_ look like a variety of programming languages have something similar (Java, Ruby, Python, etc.), but the exact set of flags that they use is not standard, so there _isn't_ really a standard to follow, just similar functions across a variety of programming languages. And honestly, strftime and strptime aren't very good. They're fairly limited IMHO, and the choice of flags is fairly arbitrary, so it seems like a good idea to design our own, assuming that we can make something better. Stewart Gordon has a library that takes a different approach ( http://pr.stewartsplace.org.uk/d/sutil/datetime_format.html ). It does away with % flags and uses maximul munch with each of the flags being name such that they don't overlap in a way that would make certain combinations of flags impossible. It then requires that characters which are not part of the flags be surrounded by single quotes. It's an interesting approach, but it isn't as flexible as it could be because of its use of maximul munch instead of % flags. So, I've come up with something new which tries to take the best of both. On the whole, I think that it's fairly straightforward, and the flags are generally recognizable and memorable (though there are a lot). It's also definitely extremely flexible (e.g. you can pass it functions to generate portions of the string if the existing flags don't get you quite what you need). But I'd like some feedback on it before I spend a lot of time on the implementation. This page has the docs for std.datetime with everything else but the proposed custom formatting functions for SysTime stripped out of it: http://jmdavis.github.com/d-programming-language.org/std_datetime.html So, what do you think? - Jonathan M Davis