Stan wrote:
>
> Hi Kish,
>
> Nice proposal!
>
> A few more comments/questions/suggestions :)
>
>
> >           ZMM            Month of the Year with leading
> >                          zeros suppressed (0 to 12).
> >           DD             Day of the Month (01 to 31).
> >           ZDD            Day of the Month with leading
> >                          zeros suppressed (1 to 31).
> >           DDD            Day of the Year (000 to 366).
> >           ZDDD           DDD with leading zeros
> >                          suppressed (1 to 366).
>
> What about:
>     BMM   (outputs:  " 1", " 2", ..., " 9", "10", "11", "12")
> and BDD   (output:   " 1", ..., " 9", "10", ...)
> and BDDD
> ...
>
> I.e., it seems to me there is one option missing...
>
> Let's review what people generally do when formatting a date into
> ASCII:
>
>    Fixed format:   (good for tabular output)
>
>       Have the MM (or DD, or DDD, or WW) take exactly the specified
>       number of characters (2 for MM, 3 for DDD, etc.).
>
>       For fixed format, the question arises: if the "format" is 2 characters,
>       but the value can be represented with 1 character (e.g., "4"), what
>       should be done?  There are 3 possibile answers::
>
>              " 4"    ---> your "ZDD"
>              "04"    ---> your "ZZ"
>              "4 "    ---> (not possible at present, and would produce
>                            ugly tabular output...let's not worry about it)
>
>    Not-Fixed format:  (good for putting dates into text)
>
>       Have the MM (or DD, or DDD, or WW) take the minimum number of
>       characters (values less than 10 would use a single character (the
>       digit); values in range 10..99 would use two characters (digits)).
>
>       So, for a "DD" output, 4 wouldb be:
>
>               "4"    ---> my BDD
>
> >      Thus,  `YYYY.MON.DAY',  `YY/MM/DD',  `DDMONYY', and `DD-ZMM-YYYY'
> >      are valid date formats.
>
> Have your considered making MON and DAY be case sensitive?
>
> I.e.:   for the date 1996-12-19 ...
>
>       "DDMONYY" --> "12DEC96"
>       "DDMonYY" --> "12Dec96"
>
>       "YYYY Mon Day"  --> "1996 Dec Thu"
>
> This would simplify generation of nice, human readable output.
> (Example: POSIX "ls -l" command, which produces dates with the month
> having an initial capital letter)
>

[other stuff snipped]

Hmmm? What's going on here? Why we're reinventing strftime(3C) one
piece at a time. Whether you like strftime % notation or not, it's
got the bases covered. So, either use strftimes format notation (lift
the code) or reinvent all of the options in the new formatting notation.

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