std.dateparse reincarnation

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Tue Oct 25 14:22:01 PDT 2011


On Tuesday, October 25, 2011 13:43 Stewart Gordon wrote:
> On 25/10/2011 20:53, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> > What does Walter have to do with anything here?
> 
> It was always my understanding that Walter is the man in charge of D
> development.

Yes and no. He's the creator of the language and the primary developer on the 
compiler (and the only one with commit access I think), but at this point, the 
standard library is more of a community effort, and if anyone is in charge of 
it, it's Andrei Alexandrescu. Walter does occasionally do work on Phobos, but 
he mostly sticks the compiler. There are a core group of developers (of which 
I'm a member) who have commit access to Phobos' github repository and are 
effectively the gatekeepers for what gets committed to Phobos, but anyone can 
submit pull requests.

> > He's not implementing any
> > date/time stuff, and he's not all that involved with Phobos development
> > in general. I'm likely the one to be implementing the custom date/time
> > formatting, and the current plan is to do something similar to strftime,
> > since that scheme seems to be fairly standard across several languages.
> 
> What are these "several languages"?

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.

> C has it. Thus C++ and D get access to it. PHP has what is just a wrapper
> around the C library function, which would appear to be there in order to
> help with porting C code.
> 
> And what is the aim - to copy some existing scheme, or to have a scheme
> that is useful, intuitive, extensible, etc.?

The primary aim is to have one that works well, but we're not going to do 
something custom just to do something custom. If there are good reasons to 
deviate from what appears to be fairly standard across a variety of languages, 
then I'm not necessarily against doing so, but we must have a good reason for 
it. 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.

Just glancing at your scheme, it wouldn't be acceptable IMHO, because it 
doesn't allow for arbitrary characters in the format specifier (such as 
putting "hours" in there as a string). It may be easy to use, but on a cursory 
inspection at least, it doesn't seem to be anywhere near powerful enough.

- Jonathan M Davis


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