Re: Approxidate with YYYY.MM

From: Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>
Date: May 10, 2011, 07:08 UTC
Message-ID: <4DC8E451.7090702@drmicha.warpmail.net>
In-Reply-To: <4DC8E129.2020306@op5.se>

Andreas Ericsson venit, vidit, dixit 10.05.2011 08:54:

Show 28 quoted lines

> On 05/10/2011 08:35 AM, Michael J Gruber wrote:
>> Brian Gernhardt venit, vidit, dixit 09.05.2011 21:02:
>>> (This is in response to a discussion on #parrot.)
>>>
>>> Rakudo (https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/) uses tags of the form
>>> YYYY.MM for their monthly releases.  When we were attempting to find
>>> the cause of a slowdown, somewhat was trying to find what commits
>>> occurred after the 2011.01 release with "git log --after=2011.01".
>>> His mistake was pointed out but this led to the confusion of why this
>>> was parsed as "May 1 2011" instead of "Jan 1 2011".  Shouldn't
>>> date.c:match_multi_number() parse something with only two numbers as
>>> a beginning of month instead of allowing it to pass through to the
>>> generic parsing?
>>
>> I just don't think there is a format like that. There is dd.mm.[yy]yy
>> and apparently also yyyy.mm.dd, but without leading zeros in mm for the
>> latter. Our date parser also takes "." for a space so that you don't
>> need to quote a space ("1.day.ago"). I can see the logic behind parsing
>> 2011.01 as January 2011, but it's a stretch from the existing formats:
>>
> 
> It would be far more logical to parse "2011-01" as "January 2011" as
> that's the preferred way to write month-precision dates in most
> countries that use both the metric system and the gregorian calender.
> 
> I've never seen that date-type with dot as a separator, but with the
> dash it's very, very common.
>

Exactly that's what I wrote. People misuse the dot format probably as frequently as the dash format, in the sense that the use an ordering which is wrong for the respective separator. We currently parse n.m as day n of month m of the current year for certain n only: We parse

31.3. as March 3rd of the current year 32.3. as May 3rd of 2032

(because May is the current month) which does not make that much sense, admittedly. I would have hoped the latter to be April 1st (current year). I agree that defaulting the month to the current month in the dot format makes no sense, but I think (and I guess we disagree here) that it's a matter of garbage in - garbage out. As for turning that garbage into marbles: 32.3. == 1.4. seems more logical to me. Note that for example

2020.9.11 -> 2020-11-09 07:06:16 +0000

which means that we *never* parse the Chinese yyyy.mm.dd correctly, not even the complete form!

Michael