Re: Timetype

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

An important observation is that the Ada Time was designed for dealing with
the most common time computation problems and didn't want to impose
unnecessary overhead, confusion & implementation difficulty. For someone who
needs to deal with a wider range to cover historical dates, the correct
answer is "Devise your own Calendar package that implements the policies you
want for years outside the normal range."

This sort of thing is also done where you might have special hardware clocks
with accuracy issues, etc. (Sometimes you have more than one time source -
which one is Ada.Calendar going to use?) It would make sense to model one's
home-grown Calendar package on Ada.Calendar to whatever extent is possible.
There are always going to be times when you need something substantially
different from whatever the language (any language) can provide you.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Mark Biggar" <mark.a.biggar@attbi.com> wrote in message
news:3D1BF397.CC974E8E@attbi.com...
>
> Yes, this range allows using the expression (year mod 4 = 0) to test
> test for leap years. BTW taking your example date, which one do you
> mean?  There is a 11 day difference between 05-jun-1712 in England and
> its colonies and that date in most of Europe.  England didn't convert
> to the Gregorian calendar until 1752, while most of Catholic europe
> converted in the 1500's.  Russia didn't convert until the 1920's, so
> even Ada's year range can cause problems with historical dates. The
> standard writers didn't want to deal with the mess that the calendar
> is in.
>