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000067_icon-group-sender _Sun Feb 27 07:39:22 1994.msg
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1994-08-19
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Wed, 2 Mar 1994 10:48:22 MST
Date: 27 Feb 94 07:39:22 GMT
From: agate!library.ucla.edu!csulb.edu!nic-nac.CSU.net!news.Cerritos.edu!news.Arizona.EDU!math.arizona.edu!CS.Arizona.EDU!not-for-mail@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Nevin Liber)
Organization: University of Arizona CS Department, Tucson AZ
Subject: Re: file dates
Message-Id: <2kpina$fn5@caslon.CS.Arizona.EDU>
References: <1994Feb23.121210.9747@hemlock.cray.com>, <5a-oml5.mengarini@delphi.com>
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Status: R
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
In article <5a-oml5.mengarini@delphi.com>,
Will Mengarini <mengarini@delphi.com> wrote:
>but I think this is a very good point that it'd be useful
>for the language to define keywords or functions for things
>that can reasonably be expected to be present on most or all
>implementations.
You have to way that against increasing the size of the language
(bloating or creeping featurism). If there is a way to do it without
adding a language feature (which you have already stated is possible
under MS-DOS, and I can think of ways to do it under Unix), then I'd
lean against adding it as a feature.
>Can anybody name an Icon implementation for a system where
>files are created & stored in a way that doesn't keep track
>of both creation date & time, & last-change date & time?
That's still not enough to make it useful. At a minimum, you would
like to be able to compare dates (eg: is date1 later than date2).
You'd probably wish to know the amount of time between two dates, and a
way to compare it to the current date. This would be highly machine
dependent (does the machine keep track of timestamps to the nearest
microsecond or to the nearest minute). You'd probably want a standard
textual representation to make it easy to create new dates to compare
against. But if you used something like &dateline as the standard
representation, should you provide functions to fix the redundant
fields (the day of the week can be calculated from the month day year
combination, making it redundant)? Would you add functions to add or
subtract time to a given date? Etc., etc.
--
Nevin ":-)" Liber nevin@cs.arizona.edu (602) 293-2799
+++ (520) after 3/95
office: (602) 621-1685