As I am interested in human-readable dates and times, and having found no conclusive discussion on time formatting, I make my recommendation for a syntax (to start discussion, and allow for date formatting to be implemented in pugs):
I would like for time() to return an object, which in numeric context is the number of seconds from the epoch (the new epoch, of course), and which in string context is a human-readable string. We could also use localtime(), and leave time() alone. Possible syntax could be: $time_object = time(); $epoch_seconds = +$time_object; $human_readable = ~$time_object; $human_readable = $time_object.format; # default format $human_readable = $time_object.format($pattern); $human_readable = $time_object.format($pattern, offset => 'local'); The default offset would probably be 'local', and would account for daylight saving time. The offset could be changed to a floating-point value indicating hours offset from UTC. A timezone module could perhaps allow for timezone names, which would allow for daylight saving time computation for non-local times. The default offset would probably be stored in a global variable. The default format would probably be an ISO 8601 format, like: 1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00 and the default format pattern would probably be stored in a global variable, possibly as an strftime() pattern. -kolibrie
