Re: [libdb-develop] [feature] Date Ranges and Database Manipulations

[Bruce D'A. <bd...@fa...>]

On Aug 18, 2004, at 6:42 PM, Morbus Iff wrote:

>> :-) .. it seems to be there are many more important
>> intricacies to work out with dates (at least for me!), like:
>> A magazine issued in "November/December", or "Spring."
>
> Hmm. That's an interesting idea. What about:
>
>  date             (as it is - YYYY-MM-DD)
>  date_approximate (a string of any kind)
>
> The downside is that they'll probably be far more date_approximate's
> than date's, and that date processing would need to be handled in the
> code, not the database.

Right; that's the problem. I just had this conversation on the XSLT 
list, where I wanted to make use of the new format-date function in 
XSLT 2.0, but couldn't because bibliographic dates are -- while regular 
-- more variable than the dates that banks and such deal with.  So, 
there must be a way to reliably handle (in a normalized way) at minimum 
YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM, and YYYY.

I wonder if the November/December thing could be thought of as two 
linked dates of a kind "composite"?  Another might be "range"?  You can 
imagine a range of years, too.  Just thinking out loud...

Bruce