DateTime->localtime() (was Re: DT::TZ test failure)

[John Siracusa]

On Sunday, August 10, 2003, at 08:08 PM, Dave Rolsky wrote:
On Sun, 10 Aug 2003, John Siracusa wrote:
We have enough constructors as it is.
Well that's not my fault :)  If, for whatever reason, you're going to
limit DateTime to N constructors, they should be the N most likely to
be used.  Do you really think from_day_of_year() is going to be called
more often than now(time_zone => 'local')?
If you only have a year and day of year, then having a from_day_of_year
constructor saves a _lot_ of calculation that end users have to do.  
OTOH,
having to do 'DateTime->now(time_zone => "local")' isn't very onerous 
at
all.
...unless that's the only way you will *ever* call now()! :)  
Seriously, who is calling now() *without* time_zone => 'local' 
arguments?  I haven't done so yet, and would like to hear some examples 
of this usage.

Here's example of what I expect to be common usage.  Let's say someone 
want the default date range in the text fields on a web form to be "the 
past 30 hours."  Joe Perl Programmer is going to glance at the DT docs 
and then write:

        $start = DateTime->now->subtract(hours => 30)->strftime(...);
        $end   = DateTime->now->strftime(...);
Joe Perl Programmer is going to be very surprised, IMO, and the fix is 
not to add warnings to the docs... ;)

-John