On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Peter J. Acklam wrote: > [I know this is a very old posting, but I just can't resist > commenting it since it is about the base time format.]
It seems a little irrelevant, and perhaps even unfair, to start rebutting comments that I made going on 2 years ago. A lot has happened since then, and we've made a lot of progress since then. The note that you're commenting on represents the *beginning* of the discussion, and addresses points that have been rehashed numerous times. Returning to the beginning does not serve our purposes a whole lot. > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rich Bowen) wrote: > > > [...] the fact that an ISO date can be expressed 6 different > > ways, which makes ISO less attractive to me. > > I don't see why this is relevant. A date may be represented in > many more than six ways, but as long as one picks one format and > everyone agrees to use that, then it's no longer a problem. This was my point, if you look at the larger context - the need to pick a single format for the internal representation. > > Julian dates, for example, require that you store the time as a > > separate field, because the julian date expresses only the date. > > It is *very* common to include a fractional part to represent the > time of day. And by allowing an arbitrary number of decimals in > the fractional part (and an arbitrary number of digits in the > integer part) one can represent *any* point in time with *any* > precision. Yes, and we frequently encountered round-off errors. > Compared to Julian days, the iCalendar format is clumsy, awkward, > and limited. These terms represent opinion, and are not useful for measuring anything particular. I find it neither clumsy nor awkward, and I don't find it limiting because I never have to deal with times of greater precision. However, once again, this is a point that we debated into the ground, and came up with practical solutions for. > > While I've read this various places, I've never encountered a > > real application where microsecond precision was necessary in a > > calendaring context. > > Is the DateTime-modules only for calendaring purposes? I thought > this was a base on which people could build modules for doing all > sorts of time calculations. Hm. Perhaps I misunderstood. It's for whatever you want to use it for. There will be no accompanying license that requires you to use it for particular purposes. I was merely stating my personal experience in my area of interest. If other people want to add support for a finer granularity of time representation, I've never opposed that. -- <DrBacchus> Context? <fajita> It's the first verse of the chapter. There is no context. (#apache on irc.freenode.net)
