On 7/14/2006 3:38 PM, Sebastian Luque wrote: > Hi, > > One of the big decisions when writing code is how to handle dates and > times. Gabor Grothendieck provided an excellent overview of the issue in > his R News 4/1 (2004) article, and many users and developers are probably > using it as a guide. The proposed guideline is to use the simplest class > required; as Gabor put it "use Date if possible, otherwise use chron, and > otherwise use POSIX". > > This seems to me a very efficient strategy, judging from my own > experiences and those of others users. All but the simplest calculations > with POSIX objects demand great care, due to time zone and and daylight > savings considerations. Therefore, I've always chosen chron for > relatively complex projects, where I don't need to deal with time zones or > daylight savings problems. The ease with which objects can be switched > from numeric to chron representations is a major advantage IMHO¹. > > If Gabor's recommendations are to be followed, wouldn't it make sense to > include chron in base R? Given that flexibility for handling time > variables is so fundamental, the addition of chron to base R would provide > users everything they need to work with time, without the need to rely on > an external package. What do others think?
Putting something into base R essentially means that it is to be taken over by R core. I think chron is being adequately maintained now (the R maintainer is already a member of R core), so I don't see a need for that. I don't see a problem having a package on CRAN. If it's a good package and people realize that it's good, and it remains available for others to use, then what problem is being solved? Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel