Time library design proposal

[Ketil Malde]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> writes:

> "S. Alexander Jacobson" <haskell at alexjacobson.com> writes:

>>    newtype Year = Year Int -- don't export constructor
>>    mkYear century centyear = Year (100*century+centyear)

Surely    .... = Year (100*(century-1)+centyear)   ?

>>    mkBigYear millenium cent centyear = ...

>> The type of hour minute and second should protect the user from 28
>> o'clock and making appointments for 31:101 PM So we probably want:

This depends on which calendar you are using.  UTC sometimes has 61
seconds.  The Ethiopian calendar has 13 months.

>> There are also lots of contexts where you want a time but not a date
>> e.g. an alarm clock....

> And there are contexts where you want a weekday and hour/minute but
> not a month or second (a weekly schedule), contexts where you want
> month/day but not a year (a holiday with a fixed date) etc. Where
> to stop?

This is hard to do if you insist of a calendar being represented as a
single record representing points in time, with a one-to-one
correspondence to a system clock.  I rather think a calendar should
let the user specify units in a more natural, flexible way.

So I don't particularly like the "incomplete" proposal, filling out
the record with Maybes.  I'd rather have a (set of) calendar(s) that
let me specify precisely which day, minute, or hour I mean, in a way
that is natural to me.  Perhaps something like:

  import Calendar.Gregorian

  easter :: Year -> Day
  easter yr = first (filter isSunday (daysFrom (springEquinox yr)))

  easter05 :: Year -> Day
  easter05 = easter 2005

  easter_lunch :: Hour
  easter_lunch = hours easter05 !! 12

  vacation :: [Day]
  vacation = daysFromTo (june 2005 !! 20) (august 2005 !! 25) -- I wish

The coupling between a calendar (as in dates and hours) and time (as
in a continous flow measured in seconds) should be loose, but one
should of course be able to find out which day, hour, nanosecond any
point in time is.

-kzm    
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants