RFC: Time Library 0.1

[Brian Smith]

This library looks complicated. I think some tutorial documentation about 
how to implement the following use cases would be very helpful to people 
that don't really care about leap seconds, etc. 

Also, I see references to POXIS and Unix in System.Time.Calendar. What is 
the portability of this module? Will it be implemented for Windows?

Use cases (primarily taken from real-world corporate IT applications I have 
developed) :

* What is the equivalent (or closest aproximation) of the SQL DateTime type 
(date and time without any timezone information)? What is the equivalent of 
the SQL Date type (date without any timezone information)?

* The user enters a date as "7/4/2005." How do I determine if this date is 
before or after July 1st of this year?

* How do I present the date "July 1st of this year" to the user in M/D/YYYY 
format?

* How do I truncate a datetime to midnight of the same day? How do I 
truncate a date to the first of the month? How do I truncate a date to the 
first day of the year it occurred in?

* Given a date X, how do I find the last day of the month that X occurs in. 
For example, If X is July 4th, 2005, then I want the result to be July 31st, 
2005. If X is Februrary 5, then I want the result to be Februrary 28 for 
non-leap-years and February 29 for leap years.

* The user enters a time T with no date, e.g. "17:30". How do I merge this 
time onto a date D (e.g. July 4, 2005), so that the result has is a datetime 
with date D and the time T (July 4, 2005 at 17:30).

* Given two datetimes T1, T2, how do I determine if they are on the same 
date?

- Brian

On 7/5/05, John Meacham <john at repetae.net> wrote:
> 
> It needs a
> getTAItime :: IO AbsoluteTime
> and a
> getLeapSecondTable :: IO LeapSecondTable
> 
> Many systems have ways to get at these and it would be a travesty if we
> didn't fix this hole in the API when we have the chance. As always, the
> library should make its best effort to get at this info. which on POSIX
> systems might be converting from UTCtime. but on other systems, TAItime
> might be the accurate one and UTCtime will have to be aproximated from
> it. (or on systems with up-to-date leap second tables they can both be
> accurate).
> 
> Also, it would be nice if the LeapSecondTable was not a functional type,
> but rather something with structure, like a list of (year,offset) pairs.
> There could be apps that will have to look at which years the leap
> seconds actually occured in and probing the function with every possible
> value in its domain is not very fun.
> 
> Also, shouldn't AbsoluteTime be an instance of several Num classes?
> 
> What units does DiffTime have? is it relative, or is the length of
> a DiffTime independent of what you do to it?
> 
> John
> --
> John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈
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