Re: Teach "approxidate" about weekday syntax
- From
- H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
- Date
- Nov 17, 2005, 23:18 UTC
- Message-ID
- <437D0FC8.6000906@zytor.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511171223110.13959@g5.osdl.org>
Linus Torvalds wrote:
Show 29 quoted lines
> This allows people to use syntax like "last thursday" for the approxidate. > > (Or, indeed, more complex "three thursdays ago", but I suspect that would > be pretty unusual). > > NOTE! The parsing is strictly sequential, so if you do > > "one day before last thursday" > > it will _not_ do what you think it does. It will take the current time, > subtract one day, and then go back to the thursday before that. So to get > what you want, you'd have to write it the other way around: > > "last thursday and one day before" > > which is insane (it's usually the same as "last wednesday" _except_ if > today is Thursday, in which case "last wednesday" is yesterday, and "last > thursday and one day before" is eight days ago). > > Similarly, > > "last thursday one month ago" > > will first go back to last thursday, and then go back one month from > there, not the other way around. > > I doubt anybody would ever use insane dates like that, but I thought I'd > point out that the approxidate parsing is not exactly "standard English". >
I believe English would always parse from right to left, it might be the right thing to do...
-hpa