Proposal for custom time string formatting in std.datetime

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Wed Dec 21 23:58:58 PST 2011


On Thursday, December 22, 2011 08:34:23 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2011-12-22 04:57, Walter Bright wrote:
> > My first thought is that std.datetime is already very large. Few will
> > need a custom date formatter, so it should be in a separate module to:
> > 
> > 1. reduce cognitive load on the programmer
> > 
> > 2. reduce the overhead pulled in for every program that may want to use
> > an std.datetime function, but not need custom formatting
> 
> As I've said several times, std.datetime is way too large and should be
> a package.

That's the way that it was originally proposed (albeit split in a poor 
manner), and a number of people (particularly Phobos devs) were against it, 
and have been any time that I've suggested splitting out part of it. The fact 
that Phobos has historically shunned sub-packages probably has a lot to do 
with that (though we're starting to have some).

To make it a package at this point would probably break a fair bit of code 
unless it were a new package which std.datetime publicly imported, so simply 
making std.datetime a package isn't necessarily a great idea, and there's a 
definite benefit IMHO in being able to just import it all with one import. But 
it's not necessarily unreasonable to create a new package which holds the 
various pieces and have std.datetime import them all.

- Jonathan M Davis


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