It'd be great to have some date math methods in there as well. Simple
things like getting the # of days/weeks/months between 2 dates is
currently much more clunky than it ought to be. It'd be nice if it had
some of what perl's DateTime module is capable of.
On 03/12/2008, at 7:19 AM, Pan Troglodytes wrote:
Now that the whole ECMAScript thing has blown over, Adobe is free of
being quite so bound to it as a standard. They've expressed
interest in doing some things that they previously shied away from
because of divergence from the standard.
Is anyone else really interested in ditching the Date class? That
thing drives me nuts. The number one problem is that it's an
object. So you get something like this:
var myDate:Date = new Date(2008, 1, 1);
var myDate2:Date = myDate;
...
myDate2.month++;
It's an easy mistake to miss, especially for beginners, and it can
be very annoying to track done. It's also a pain that you can
assign values to the time, day, month, etc. properties and it screws
up data bindings and setters/getters. For example, if I have:
private var myDate:Date;
[Bindable] public function set myDate(value:Date):void
{
_myDate = value;
invalidateDisplayList();
}
public function get myDate():Date
{
return _myDate;
}
It works great until you do something like:
myDate.time = newDate.time;
or
myDate.date++;
Simliar difficulties exist when using a date dropdown control.
So is it time to get a new Date class? Perhaps a new one called
DateTime and make the old one deprecated.
What I'd love is for it to be a new primitive type (like Number,
int, Boolean) that would be stored the same way as the time property
of Date and would be manipulated through static functions of the
DateTime class. Examples:
var myDate:DateTime = DateTime.now();
trace("myDate:", myDate);
>> myDate: 1228248636245
myDate = DateTime.incHour(myDate);
myDate = DateTime.incMinute(myDate, 20);
myDate = DateTime.incMonth(myDate, -3);
myDate = DateTime.incHourUTC(myDate);
myDate = DateTime.encode(2008, 1, 1);
var hours:Number = DateTime.getHours(myDate2 - myDate1);
No more "date" or "fullYear" - use the much more intuitive "day" and
"year". I would also like month to be one-based, but that'd
probably make enough people grumble that I'd be willing to live
without it.
I dream of seeing all the existing controls and such that use Date
updated to use this code instead. I would have already created the
DateTime class if it wasn't for how much trouble daylight savings
time, leap year and internationalization would be.
--
Jason
