[squeak-dev] Class comment for Date mentions #localizedDates

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Mon Jun 27 03:30:35 UTC 2016


Hi Chris,

I was really just trying to ask for a good class comment. The current
comment contains an error, and I used that as an excuse for raising the
question.

I want to know the *meaning* of the Date class. And I would like the
class comment to say what it means. The meaning seems to have changed
considerably over the last ten or fifteen years as the implementations
have changed, and I think that it would be helpful if the current
definition could be stated as clearly as possible.


On Sat, Jun 25, 2016 at 07:34:02PM -0500, Chris Muller wrote:
> Hi Dave, Dates created as positions by default is the definitely the
> correct behavior.  The original Date implementation inherited the
> abstraction from Timespan of a custom duration starting at a
> particular DateAndTime.  While that is a fine for abstract Timespans,
> it turned out to be a bad idea for Dates, since the vast majority of
> the use of Dates are as positions, not spans.

I am not sure what is meant by "Dates as positions". When I first read
this, I was thinking of "position relative to GMT" but on reading it
again I realized that it probably means "position on a continuum of date
values". Or maybe I am just completely confused (hence my plea for a
good class comment). Despite my confusion, my own best guess at the
current intended meaning of "Date" was in my original question below.

A bit off topic, but is is worth asking:
If we really want to model Date as a position on a continuum of date
values, and if we think that the implementation of Date as a kind of
Timespan is not right, then shouldn't we just consider going back to
the earlier (Squeak 3.6 and earlier) implementation of Date as a Magnitude,
rather than Date as a Timespan?

Dave

> 
> Check out the discussion surrounding Berts recent clarification of the
> implementation, where the timezone for Dates-as-positions is now set
> to nil, so the "localized" or "globalized" nomenclature can be removed
> from the comment.
> 
>  - Chris
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 8:05 AM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> > The class comment says:
> >
> >   Instances of Date are Timespans with duration of 1 day.
> >
> >   Their default creation assumes a start of midnight of UTC to provide the fast, globalized Dates out of the box.  The legacy behavior that creates Timezone-sensitive Dates can be used by sending #localizedDates.
> >
> >
> > I no longer see #localizedDates in the image, so I think the comment needs an update.
> >
> >
> > For reference, and earlier version of the class comment said this:
> >
> >   Instances of Date are Timespans with duration of 1 day.
> >   Their default creation assumes a start of midnight in the local time zone.
> >
> >
> > I am not sure what the comment should say, but I would be happy if it could
> > better convey the intended meaning of "Date" in addition to the explanation
> > about creating instances relative to UTC versus local time zone.
> >
> > My expectation would be that a Date is a Timespan with a start value set to
> > midnight in some time zone. The start value is a DateAndTime, and the offset
> > instance variable of that DateAndTime would reflect that time zone.
> >
> > I would therefore expect that a "globalized" Date is a special case of a Date
> > that was created with the start of the Timespan at midnight UTC, regardless
> > of the current local time zone. A "globalized" Date is no different from any
> > other Date, it is simply a Date that was created with time zone UTC.
> >
> > Is that right?
> >
> > Dave
> >
> >


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