Re: date/Snow Leopard changed
Re: date/Snow Leopard changed
- Subject: Re: date/Snow Leopard changed
- From: Deivy Marck Petrescu <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 20:08:55 -0400
On Sep 6, 2009, at 00:26, Christopher Nebel wrote:
On Sep 5, 2009, at 2:38 PM, Deivy Marck Petrescu wrote:
Long time ago there was a software that was really user friendly
and allowed people to write nifty applications. It is here no more.
It programming language was called HyperTalk, a sister of
AppleScript.
The program was HyperCard.
It had, in the early 90s a way to deal with dates that would allow
everyone, no matter where they were and how they wrote their dates
it would be converted properly to the users Mac.
It was called dateItems. And it was "year,month,day, hour,
minutes, seconds"
So given a dateItem we could convert it to any time format.
Isn't is time AS would have something like that?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but that sounds like the existing
date object. It's a class, and it's got read/write properties for
all those parts, and they're all documented. People run into
problems because they try to deal with dates by assembling strings
and converting them, which is obviously prone to format issues.
Fine: don't use the formatted string, use the properties, like Shane
described earlier in the thread.
The problem of taking arbitrary input and teasing a date out of it
is a separate problem. If there are cases the new API doesn't
handle, please file bugs; the actual component is ICU, but you can
file them against AppleScript and we'll route them to the right
place. It's actually more flexible than the release notes say (they
were accurate at the time). I need to confirm this with the ICU
people, but it looks like it requires that the components all be
present in the right order, but the punctuation and white space
between them doesn't matter. For example, on my US system,
"9/4/2009", "9-4-2009", and "9 4 2009" all evaluate to September 4,
2009.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
Chris,
I am missing something... the dateItems à la HyperCard.
As you say at the end of your letter
"For example, on my US system, "9/4/2009", "9-4-2009", and "9 4 2009"
all evaluate to September 4, 2009."
"on my US system" being the key.
AS is international and Apple sells computer all over the world. I am
impressed as the effort put forward by Apple to accommodate everyone.
But when it comes to date in AS, I still have to guess as to what is
the locale we are working with.
Which by the way generated a flood of emails because everyone uses his/
hers date.
So if I set
property dt: date "05/06/07"
How is that going to be interpreted in Yvan's computer? What about
Axel's?
How about mine, that uses the American date but uses the 24 hour clock?
In Hypertalk we could (I forgot Hypertalk, so don't take me literally)
property dt: dateItems "2009,09,06,1,19,48,24"
And in every computer running Hypertalk it would get the correct date
(today's date in this example)
Note also that if I had this to be run by an user, I can force the
user to give me any date as date item
set item_1_of_date_Item to text returned of display dialog "enter
year ....
We should not have this kinds of long threads because we can not agree
on time.
I said that Bob Poland's computer had a problem... I had a problem I
forgot am/pm since I don't use it.
So, I am all for a dateitems that is locale independent. A
timeItems iwould be better but we can use date string since it always
return am/pm.
But the whole idea is to have a locale independent way of sharing dates.
By the way I'd prefer a dateItems without weekday.
It does not hurt to ask... :)
Deivy Petrescu
email@hidden
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