Hi David

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 9:40 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis@mail.msen.com> wrote:

<snip>

>
> For what it is worth, I spend >80% of my time working with
> dates/timestamps, trying to turn them into Magnitudes for manipulations.
> The other 20%, I really enjoy them as timespans with locales since I deal
> with times from around the world. But the two uses are not quite easy to
> deal with - doable, just not quite intuitive.
>
> -cbc

Based on your experience, do you think that it would make sense to have
two classes for Day and Date, where one represents date as duration, and
the other represents date as magnitude?

Dave

Sorry for the long delay.

Having Date (or Day) as a duration has positive benefits. For instance, I want to know if a particular timestamp (when something happened, what we call DateAndTime) happened on a particular Date. The DateAndTime might be in a different timezone than the Date we are checking. Being able to just ask 'is this timestamp from this date' is nice:

theDate := ('2016-07-06' asDate start offset: 4 hours) asDate.

theTime := '2016-07-06 20:34:02' asDateAndTime offset: 8 hours.

theDate includes: theTime " => false"

theTime := '2016-07-06 20:34:02' asDateAndTime offset: -8 hours.

theDate includes: theTime " => true"

Although it is hard to get a date in a certain timezone - is there a better way than what I wrote above? Rarely do I need it in my timezone - instead I need to specify it directly or not have it present at all.

Most of the time, though, I just as a number, not a duration. I just want to show it, sometimes work from its beginning to some other time, and ignore that it is a duration.

Looking at how you are interpreting my statement that I want it as a magnitude, I think I was using the wrong words. What I really meant was that I wanted it ignore the duration (and most especially the timezone) - but not use it as a raw number of some kind.

Thanks,

-cbc