Re: Calendar - leap seconds

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>]

"Nick Roberts" <nickroberts@adaos.worldonline.co.uk> writes:

> I'm going to upset people here :-/ but Ada.Calendar should never have dealt
> with the extremely thorny issue of converting continuous absolute time to
> and from a calendrical system such as Gregorian (or whatever you want to
> call it). It should have been called Ada.Time_Functions and simply had two
> functions such as To_MJD(:Time) and To_Time(:MJD).*
> 
> There could then have been an optional package
> Ada.Text_IO.Gregorian_Calendar, as well as perhaps
> Ada.Text_IO.Time_Within_Day (for hours minutes and seconds), etc.

I'm not sure why moving some of the functionality to a
Gregorian_Calendar package would "upset" anyone.
It seems like a fairly minor change.

I do think it's a mistake to have the Clock function in the same package
as all those conversion functions.  Clock is doing I/O, and shouldn't be
mixed with the rest (the rest being "pure" code).

I see the same mistake in Text_IO -- it mixes formatting with I/O.

I find it annoying, for example, that if I want decimal-formatted
integer, I can use 'Image, but if I want hexdecimal, I have to import
Text_IO (or write my own).  Hexadecimal formatting has nothing directly
to do with I/O of character strings!

- Bob