Re: Teach "approxidate" about weekday syntax

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Nov 17, 2005, 23:18 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511171505080.13959@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v1x1eubpr.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

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>
> It is not English but Gittish, which is fine, but it somehow
> reminds me of the funny way users make themselves understood by
> IF parsers ;-).  I am afraid you started small but now are going
> towards the same insanity of gnudate (it has insane yacc grammar
> to grok these things), and I suspect we'd better draw a line
> somewhere.

I think I'm done.

The multi-week "3 sundays ago" part came for free, but the "last sunday" was actually something I liked.

Seriously, I can't imagine what else we'd want. It parses exact dates (thanks to the old date-parsing code), and it now parses all the normal "lazy dates" I can think of.

The fact that you can combine "last saturday" with "three days ago" is really not a feature as much as a result of the algorithm being so simple that it just doesn't care, and the combination just happens to work.

My examples were a bit silly as a result. In real life, you'd probably never use any combinations, but simply use

	"December 5th"
	"last sunday"
	"yesterday"
	"two days ago"
	"12 hours ago"

and the fact that then some (but definitely not all) combinations of the above all work is really just an accident and not something that people should necessarily even depend on.

Show 8 quoted lines

> > Side note 2: if you want to avoid spaces (because of quoting issues), you 
> > can use any non-alphanumberic character instead. So
> >
> > 	git log --since=2.days.ago
> >
> > works without any quotes.
> 
> I think this is a useful change.  Thanks.

That's actually not a new change, the approxidate thing always worked that way, but I thought I'd point it out.

		Linus