datetime review part 2 [Update 4]

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday 17 November 2010 21:57:58 Steve Teale wrote:
> It's difficult to find a suitable entry point in this thread, so I'll just
> arbitrarily use here.
> 
> Various language libraries have flexible facilities for formatting
> date/time values, maybe c#, and certainly PHP, whereby you can specify a
> format string, something like "%d'th %M %Y".
> 
> Is this a useful idea? I have some code kicking around somewhere.

It is definitely a useful idea. However, having strings in standard formats is 
more important (and far simpler - albeit not simple), so that's what's included 
at the moment. At some point, I will likely implement toString() and 
fromString() methods which take format strings, but having those be 
appropriately flexible and getting them right is not simple, so I put them off for 
the moment. I have several TODO comments in the code with ideas of functionality 
to add at a later date, and that is one of them. So, ideally it would be in 
there, but it already took long enough to implement what's there that it seemed 
appropriate to put off implementing further functionality until the basic design 
is approved and in Phobos.

- Jonathan M Davis