[REBOL] Re: [date date! month month-bounds] MONTH-BOUNDS func design
From: gregg::pointillistic::com at: 28-Jan-2008 16:08
Hi Carl, and Ed,
EOC> If you're building this as part of a larger set of functions, let us
EOC> know. Dates are a great candidate for dialects.
Yes, this is the motivation. I have a library of date related
functions, and BOUNDS and RANGE funcs that can deal with dates. If we
have a good set of funcs, and design them for easy use on their own,
or from a dialect, it would give us great flexibility.
Another example question, which I almost posted as the primer question
on this topic, is whether a LEAP-YEAR? func should always require a
year, or should it default to the current year, and use a refinement
if you want a different year.
And the same question for MONTH-BOUNDS applies to WEEK-BOUNDS.
EOC> Reaching back to my smalltalk days, I recall that they had a lot of
EOC> nice classes that helped with calendars. The methods DaysInMonth and
EOC> CalendarForMonth come to mind, iirc.
I have DaysInMonth already, and a lot of others, e.g.
same-day-last-month, year-week, weeks-in-year, week-bounds. And a copy
of Ed's calc-workdays funcs. :)
CR> Why are two values even required? Is there any month that doesn't
CR> start on the 1st? It's useful to be able to get the last day of a
CR> month since they vary, but I don't see the need for returning
CR> a block with the first as well in it.
EOC> Don't we always know what the date of a given month is? And the
EOC> start time/end times for any month? :^)
Starting today, what do you have to do to get a list of all dates in
the current month? Or how do you compare a date to see if it was last
month, or in any given date range?
That is, how can we best express the abstraction of date and time
ranges? For a monthly calendar display, you need just the dates. For a
scheduler that gives you daily and weekly views, you need more detail.
In the case of month-bounds, let's say a user can say "find me all the
files that were added/updated between x and y". Given dates, or just a
month name (files updated in jan-2008), we need the time detail to
catch everything.
-- Gregg
