So now I'm pondering on Ricks' suggestion that I should make
DT::F::Japanese behave more like (strp|strf)time. This is mainly me
talking to myself, but please pitch in if you have any ideas (especially
if you speak/read/write Japanese -- I know you guys are out there)
First, I need to enumerate the possible formats:
- General Number Representation:
- roman (ascii)
- double-byte roman
- double-byte kanji
- Year Representation
- by gregorian
- by gregorian, with gregorian marker
- by gregorian, with A.C./B.C. marker
- by Japanese era (mutually exclusive with the above three)
- Month representation
- month-number followed by "month" kanji
- traditional month names (to be implemented with
DT::F::J::Traditional)
- Time
- Am/Pm
- modern notation
- traditional notation (to be implemented with
DT::F::J::Traditional)
- Miscellaneous
- Day of week
- There's this thing that assigns names to each date
in cycle of 6 days, which I may or may not add
(requires traditional calendar)
My main concerns in trying to encode this into a (strp|strf)time-ish
format are as follows:
- Encoding is actually a combination of number representation
and whatever else format. for example, the era notation is
actually 1) era/roman 2) era/double-byte roman 3) era/kanji.
- I personally think that the encoding scheme for (strp|strf)time
is horrendous in some cases -- %[a-zA-Z] is just confusing
sometimes -- it certainly doesn't make it easier for the Japanese
audience
- I'm already jumping through hoops trying to write regexps that
match unicode Japanese. Will this add even more to the pain?
Hmmm, I guess I'm just having a hard time trying to picture what it is
that I gain while I feel that I lose a lot of the ease of use and
maintainability by adding this (strp|strf)time-ish generalization on the
formatting. But I may be wrong. Please let me know if you have any
comments on this.
--d
