[dmd-internals] How important are the exact formats of __DATE__, __TIME__, and __TIMESTAMP___?

[Benjamin Shropshire]

On 03/08/2011 07:36 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Do they _have_ to be in a particular format? I ask because I've slowly been
> going through the lexer code, translating it to D for std.lang.d.lex, and I'm
> very tempted to just use std.datetime to produce the values for __DATE__,
> __TIME__, __TIMESTAMP__. The resulting values would look cleaner IMHO, and the
> code would be simpler. However, that _would_ result in a slightly different
> format for __DATE__ and __TIMESTAMP__.
>
> Honestly, I didn't even know that these "macros" existed before I ran into them
> in the lexer - there's no mention of them on the site as far as I can determine.

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/lex.html#specialtokens

That also sets the format.

> So, I have no idea whether they're exact format is considered important and part
> of the spec or not. If the format _is_ important, then I might as well leave it
> and have the D code call time and ctime as it does in the C++ code, but I'd just
> as soon use std.datetime if the format doesn't have to be absolutely exact.
>
> So, are the formats of __DATE__, __TIME__, and __TIMESTAMP__ exact such that
> they should _always_ be as they currently are in the C++ lexer, or are they
> flexible enough that I can just simplify the code in the D lexer with
> std.datetime?
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
> _______________________________________________
> dmd-internals mailing list
> dmd-internals at puremagic.com
> http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals