Timezones

tblanchard at mac.com tblanchard at mac.com
Tue May 6 17:22:32 UTC 2003


On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 05:38  AM, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:

> [Whole timezone thing]
> Has me thoroughly confused.

Yes, this is what happens when important commonly required facility is 
ignored for too long - now we have too many incompatible solutions.

> Let's see if I got this right -
> * The TimeZoneDB package should stay on SM, it is for specific uses.

I think all agree here.

> * What affects everyone and therefore should be in the image is that
> their image be aware of the current timezone and that this be treated
> correctly.

Yes.

> * These two are addressed respectively by
>  - The primitive Dave was talking about
>  - a subset of the ANSI stuff that includes DateAndTime.
>
> Is this correct?

I think so - but now I'm confused by Brent's message as I'm not clear 
what relation (if any) his package (which I just learned of) has to the 
ANSICompatibility package put up by Alain Fischer (which I have loaded 
now).

The comment reads:
'From Squeak3.2 of 11 July 2002 [latest update: #4956] on 24 November 
2002 at 7:29:24 pm'!
"Change Set:		ANSICompatibility-AFi
Date:			24 November 2002
Author:			Alain Fischer

This change set add ANSI compatibility to Squeak 3.2.
Now TestRunner with ANSI tests loaded show (2777 run, 2753 passed, 24 
failed, 0 errors).

17 classes (8 new / 9 modified)

New classes:
ArithmeticError, DateAndTime, Duration, FloatingPointException,
RuleDate, RuleIndexDate, RuleSelectionCodeDate, ScaledDecimal

Modified Classes:
BlockContext (added method #argumentCount)
Character (added method #codePoint)
Character class (added method #codePoint:)
Float (2 methods added, 3 methods #modified)
Float class (added method #one)
Fraction (1 method added, 1 method modified)
Fraction class (added method #one)
Integer (6 methods added, 1 method modified)
Integer class (added method #one)
Number (7 methods added, 2 methods modified)
Number class (modified method #readRemainderOf:from:base:withSign:)
PositionableStream (modified method #skip:)
String (3 methods added)
TestRunner (2 methods modified)
ZeroDivide is now subclass of ArithmeticError
"!

To remain focused on the basic goal - timezone aware squeak - Brent's 
package is more focused (it only deals with dates and times where the 
ANSI package has a whole grab bag of stuff from the ANSI spec) and thus 
is "the simplest thing that could possibly work".

But to adopt it renders the ANSI set on SM incompatible with base 
squeak and I think down the road we'd like to improve ANSI 
compatibility to make sharing code with other ST's easier.

Decisions, decisions....

Anybody have an opinion?

-Todd Blanchard



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