On 21/11/2014 08:50, Gary Herron wrote:
On 11/21/2014 12:35 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
I've finally found a use for Python.
When, in the course of my genealogy research, I look at census or burial
records, I often want to work out a person's date of birth from their
age.
It's a simple matter of mental arithmetic, but I sometimes get it
wrong, and
mislead myself. There are calculators and date calculation programs,
but they
are usually too complicated and try to do too much, so by the time you've
worked out what to do it takes much longer.
This Python script does it for me.
year = input("Year: ")
age = input("Age: ")
born = year-age
print 'Year of birth:', born
It's so simple, so elementary, that it's not really worth writing about,
except for the fact that it illustrates the KISS principle.
It is sometimes better to have a simple program that does one thing
well than
a complex one that does lots of things, but none of them very
efficiently.
The average hand calculator can do the same job, but you have to pick
it up
and put it down, and you can't easily see if you've made a typo.
Having said that, however, yes, I would perhaps like to use Python for
more
complicated date processing routines, namely to convert the kinds of
dates
produced by genealogy programs to a simple yyyy-mm-dd that computer
database
programs can understand, so that "Abt May 1677" would be rendered as
"1677-05-00"
Has anyone done something like that in Python?
The datetime module has lots of capabilities including the several you
mention.
See https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html
Gary Herron
As we're now firmly heading into the Python 3 era would people please be
kind enough to use the Python 3 links. I know it's only a single
character change but it's the principle to me. TIA.
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
