[Ocaml-lib-devel] Re: Some tricky, but useful functions ... for discussion

[Jesse G. <je...@wi...>]

Jesse Guardiani wrote:

> Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> 
>>> On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 08:32:53AM -0700, Blair Zajac wrote:
>>> > Richard Jones wrote:
>>> > >Perl has a very extensive module with date support:
>>> > >http://search.cpan.org/dist/Date-Calc/Calc.pod
>>> >
>>> > As an FYI, many of the Perl people got fed up with all the different
>> date
>>> > time modules and started a new set of modules to provide the same
>>> > functionality, but hopefully learning from experience.
>>> >
>>> > http://datetime.perl.org/
>>>
>>> There seem to be some problems with the Datetime concept and OCaml.
>>> The main problem I can see is the fact that Datetime is fundamentally
>>> object oriented.  I'd prefer to see a solution where dates are
>>> represented (ideally) by tuples or by structures, because this allows
>>> simple pattern matching.  However, I understand that the complexity
>>> behind a general datetime type may make this difficult to achieve.
>>>
>>> FWIW, GregorianDate (derived from Date::Calc) is relatively simple and
>>> self-contained.  It represents dates as tuples of either (year, month,
>>> day) or (year, week) (for ISO 8601 business dates).  It doesn't depend
>>> on any existing representations, nor would anything depend on it.  It
>>> clearly (from the name) only deals with the Gregorian calendar.  So
>>> I'd like to propose it as a "good enough" candidate for ExtLib,
>>> because it's independent and can even be deprecated later without
>>> affecting anything but the direct users of that one module.  See
>>> attached the .mli with documentation.
>>>
>>> Rich.
>> 
>> I think that a DateTime module would be more useful than only dates.
>> We could represent as a Unix.tm structure or as a float returned by
>> Unix.time() , and provide some printing and extracting facilities.
> 
> I agree. And I vote for the float from Unix.time(). I think then all
> we need is a formatting function that works like the UNIX date program
> (printf style formatting). Does anyone know enough about how printf
> works to tackle such a function?

Actually, if all we're doing is returning a string, this function wouldn't
require any of the normal Printf tricks. One string argument input, and
one string output. 

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