AltME: Ren - Time & Duration

Messages

Andreas
The absolute / relative date/time proposal up on ren-data.org looks quite good. A few thoughts after first digesting it for a bit:
Standalone times as relative times: +1
Basic constraints for month and day value ranges in date and time-of-day/seconds: +1
Standalone relative dates don't strike me as something particularly worthy of providing, at first glance.
I also think that the forced sign looks rather awkward for negative rel-dates: -1-1-1, -10-0-1. Further, I think that date arithmetic with relative dates may be _really_ awkward.
So I'd suggest limiting any-data-time to just abs-date-time or abs-date or rel-time, for starters.

Gregg
Thanks Andreas! Good feedback. I agree that negative rel-dates aren't pretty. When I wrote examples for my test parser, I used 4 digits for all years, which made them less ugly (-0000-01-00). We could easily require a minimum of 4 digits. Still not perfect, but perhaps better.
I also agree that date math is tricky (all around), but Ren doesn't have to do the math. :-) For me, it's a question of "how else do we do it?" if relative dates are useful?
Tough call, as I think there *is* value in relative dates. Some of that value comes from them being imprecise, which conveys meaning as humans sometimes do.
DocKimbel
No objection.
Rebolek
no problem
Arnold
ok here
Gregg
Done.

Last message posted 459 weeks ago.