Article Review: Migrating from std.date to std.datetime

[Jonathan M Davis]

It recently came to my attention that an article on converting code from using 
std.date to using std.datetime would be of value, so I wrote one up. Since 
it's an article, and it's within the time period set by Walter for the article 
contest, I guess that it's in the article contest, but I wrote it because it 
needed writing rather than for the contest. It might as well be part of the 
contest though.

In any case, I put it in my d-programming-language.org repository on github: 
https://github.com/jmdavis/d-programming-language.org/tree/article_datetime

Or if you just want to download it without building d-programming-language.org 
yourself, go here: http://is.gd/jFAmDy

So, feel free to read it and give feeback on it. Hopefully it does its job 
fairly well. Writing it did give me some insight into a couple of tweaks that 
need to be made to std.datetime though. In particular, I really should come up 
with a better way to save time zones for those that care about restoring the 
_exact_ time zone that they had in the SysTime that they saved in a database 
or to disk or whatever. ISO is great for storing the exact time - including 
what the offset from UTC of the original time zone was - but it's not 
generally enough for restoring the exact time zone that you were dealing with 
in the first place. Most code won't care, but I really should find a way to do 
it. I knew about the problem, but it's definitely a pain to solve, so I left 
it alone. I should work on fixing that.

In any case, the article is now available for you to read and review.

- Jonathan M Davis