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From: The Mad Fishmonger <gdfast@usgs.gov>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.announce,comp.lang.perl.modules
Subject: ANNOUNCE: DateTime.pm v1.4
Followup-To: comp.lang.perl.modules
Date: 31 Mar 1998 23:37:49 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Announcing DateTime.pm, v1.4

  I'd like to announce the public release for comment of DateTime.pm,
  a module for the representation and manipulation of (almost) arbitrary
  locations in time.  This module was developed for in-house use (for
  indexing the time-series axis in graphs of historical water data), and
  we've found it to be rather useful so we'd like to get feedback from
  others on it.  I'm tossing this out mostly for comment, feel free
  to ignore it.

  DateTime.pm is not intended to be a replacement for any of the
  existing Date:: or Time:: modules, but you may find it useful as a
  suplement.  Notable features:

  * Date is represented internally by a ordered non-unix-epoch
    identifier, so that dates as far back as the Beginning of Time
    (well, functionally the start of the Gregorian calendar) can be
    stored.

  * Functions are provided for doing date/time calculations.
    Increment and decrement, as well as round, floor and ceil
    functions by unit (second through year) are provided, as well as
    simple date-difference operations.

  * Functions are provided for input from and output to user-specified
    formats (dprintf and dscanf).
  

Module available at:

  http://www-il.usgs.gov/~gdfast/dist/DateTime-1.4.tar.gz

Some documentation is viewable at:

  http://www-il.usgs.gov/~gdfast/DateTime.html



    Frequently asked questions:

What?  Another date module?

  Yes.  The others didn't do what we needed.

Like what?

  Like the ability to index 15-minute time-series data from 1870 to the
  present, and the ability to read and print dates + times in arbitrary
  formats (well, that last's not really true, see Date::Parse and
  Date::Format.  I am a pathological liar, trust me in all things).

  Honestly, we had a set of requirements here which the existing date
  and time modules met clumsily.  You may find this useful, or you may
  hate it.  I'm curious to know either way.

Does it have any bugs or evil glitches?

  No.  Next question.  Well, ok, it's not year 10000 compliant, it
  doesn't handle time zones or the changeover to the Gregorian calendar, 
  and dates before AD 1 are not stable.  There's probably more.

And why is a top-level module?  Shouldn't it be at least
Date::DateTime?

  Oh, so you think that DateTime isn't a unique name?  Bah.  
  (Actually, it's high on the list of things-to-do.  But we've been
  using it as DateTime for a long time here, and we're basically lazy.)


-- 
Greg Fast