> On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Jonathan Swartz wrote:
>
> > Say I've got a function that takes a duration. I could
> >
> > 1) require the user to do DateTime::Duration->new(...);
> > 2) take a listref argument containing the params, e.g. [days=>1] and do
the
> > creation myself
> > 3) be flexible and take either argument, distinguishing the two by isa()
> >
> > Any advice from others that have written APIs using durations?
>
> DateTime.pm itself just has two methods in each case. So we have add(),
> which takes raw parameters, and add_duration() which takes an object. The
> former is very simply syntactic sugar for the the latter.
Right. That doesn't scale as well, though, for functions that take multiple
durations, or even for functions that take a duration as one of many
arguments. Might be interesting to think about a standard shorthand for
durations (like a simple list reference) and a parse_duration_param method,
so we could write functions like:
sub function_with_two_durations
{
my $duration1 = DateTime::Duration->parse_duration_param(shift);
my $duration2 = DateTime::Duration->parse_duration_param(shift);
parse_duration_param would convert a list reference to a DateTime::Duration
and just return a DateTime::Duration untouched, leaving the caller to decide
how to pass it.
Jon
