Faithful Guardians of the Name::Space,
Hello! I am near completion of a module that encapsulates date, time,
and timezone information efficiently and conveniently in OO style. I
would appreciate your advice on how to name the module and its two
classes.
Here is some sample usage to whet the appetite:
$d = JTobey::Date->today;
print $d->strftime ("%B %d, %Y\n");
for my $y ($d->year .. $d->year + 3) {
print "<OPTION> $y\n";
}
$tomorrow = $d->plus(1);
The module is implemented as:
JTobey::
::Date cdpO Dates and Date/Time/Timezones as objects JTOBEY
I see this entry in the modules list:
Date::
::Time idpO Lightweight normalised datetime data type TIMB
I think it is probably a match, and I am willing to take
responsibility for Date::Time.
I decided to use two separate, unrelated classes (no @ISA). One is
for dates and the other for <date, time, timezone> tuples. The
packages are currently called JTobey::Date and JTobey::TimeDate.
Earlier versions had dates and timedates related by class inheritance.
I may eventually go back to that, but having them separate serves to
emphasize important differences.
The simple date class benefits greatly from not having to worry about
times, time zones, and daylight savings time. It is essentially just
an integer number of days offset from a reference point in the
Gregorian(?) Calendar. (I chose 1 Jan 1970 as the reference point,
although the objects know nothing about the time_t type or the time()
function.)
If you throw times of day into the mix, you will soon want to involve
time() values. This leads to awareness of time zones and daylight
savings. The application that drives this module's development
requires comparison and formatting of datetimes in different time
zones, so that will be supported. OTOH, my application does not care
about fractional seconds, so that'll be on the wish list. :)
Multiple language support will probably be tacked on at some point.
I divide the TimeDate object into a Date, a number of seconds since
midnight, and a POSIX "TZ" time zone (undef for local time). The
implementation accesses zone information by locally setting $ENV{TZ}
whenever needed, but I have thought seriously about borrowing libc
code that parses the zoneinfo files so that I can cache them as a
performance enhancement.
Whoever knows what the following string means is qualified to look at
the PRE-ALPHA version: ":pserver:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/home/cvs co
Date". Some functions use GBarr's Date::Format and Date::Parse from
the CPAN package TimeDate. Perl's standard POSIX module is also used.
I hope somebody besides me gets to exercise the 400-year Feb 29 code
this time around....
Thanks
-John
--
John Tobey, late nite hacker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
\\\ ///
]]] With enough bugs, all eyes are shallow. [[[
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