On 23/12/2011 11:23, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
<snip>
So, your flags are even more restrictive than I understood them to be. You
can't have multiple-character flags unless they're the same letter. I thought
that you could. That _does_ avoid the problem that I was describing, but the
result is too limiting IMHO. It certainly makes it hard to add flags for
specific formats similar to %ctime or %mpeg7.
What is the use case for including a full date in some externally defined format within a
longer formatted date string? ISTM the way to do this is to define a function that just
generates this format straight off. In my library, toShortFormatString and
toLongFormatString are already examples of this.
It also means that you can't reuse letters.
At the moment only 12 letters are used. I can't see the whole alphabet being used up any
time in the foreseeable future.
<snip>
It's possible that your scheme is somewhat easier to use for the most basic
cases, but as soon as more specific and/or complicated schemes are needed (e.g.
mpeg-7 or any of the ISO schemes), I don't think it works as well in general.
<snip>
I think I could expand my scheme to include ISO signed-year notation easily enough. In
the mpeg-7 standard, does the denominator of the fractional second have to be the smallest
possible power of 10, or is F20/1000 or F0/1000 allowed just as well?
Stewart.
