On 3/15/11 6:02 AM, John Caron wrote:
so if currently we cant actually use months and years, because of the
way udunits handles them,
I think udunits has nothing to do with it -- one shouldn't use months
and years in the context of "unit-of-time since a date", because it's
sloppy and ill-defined. Period, end of story.
There are various date-time libraries that will let you do math like:
a_date_time + 3 months.
But in that case, the actual length of "3 months" depends on the
date-time it is being added to.
On 3/15/11 9:13 AM, Steve Hankin wrote:
Here I think concerns of human-readable formatting and convenience are
sliding into issues of accurate encoding.
I agree -- human-readable formatting should be a very low concern for
this -- CF is about encoding data -- accuracy and clarity are far more
important.
ncdump already offers an
option to format these values as dates. Ncgen could in principle offer
conversions to encode various human-friendly formatting options.
right -- human-readable is for utilities.
This is one of those rare areas where our responsibility as
software developers should be to push back against sloppy science, by
offering software that makes it easy to do the calculations correctly,
and help to end these sloppy practices.
Speaking as a scientist and a software developer -- hear hear!
And can we get rid of daylight saving time while we're at it? ;-)
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