On Thursday, June 19, 2003 Jerry Wilcox wrote: >At 4:25 PM +0200 6/19/03, Peter J. Acklam wrote: >>Anyway, I see your point, but I don't agree. There is only need >>for an agreement when ambiguous formats are used, which is a good >>thing since ambiguous date formats are, as everyone here knows, a >>big pain in the butt. >> >>Those who wrote the standard could, of course, have disallowed all >>formats which are ambiguous, but these formats are sometimes >>useful, so they allowed them on the condition that everone agrees >>on what the ambiguous formats are supposed to mean. >> > >I have to say that I agree with Peter here. A "standard" set of >library modules cannot, by definition, support whatever outside >agreements might be in place between two organizations. Any module >that purports to be generally useful should simply disallow ambiguity >by never assuming that a format is an expanded (per the ISO >definition) one. > >Jerry
I concur. An interesting challenge here might be to devise a way to allow DateTime to exploit the full range of ISO 8601 formats, in cases where the user knows that the appropriate agreements exist among the parties. Perhaps a DT::F::ISO8601 parameter like accept => ['YYYYDDD'], could be used, evoking the necessary routines to parse & format. (I put this in the form of an array ref to handle multiple accepts.) Just a thought. - Bruce
