Dates/Times are circular... | The Coffeehouse

ManipUni
Proving QQ for 5 years!

What is wrong with people? I keep running across people who entirely fail to fathom the fact that dates and times are a circular thing so for example January is both before AND after December, and 1300 is both before and after 1700.

I've just decided that people just shouldn't be allowed to write Time/Date code *at all.* It is, in fairness, very complex with a whole host of exceptions and small screwups can have big consequences.

JavaScript errors are anecdotally the MOST common. I'm guessing largely because JavaScript has no native DateTime object with comparisons, addition, and subtraction handled for you... So everyone attempts to write one themselves or worse to write just enough so it appears to work until the year rolls around or a leap day/hour happens.

Just today I was unable to buy a return train ticket because the outgoing date was in 2009 and the return date was in 2010 with no means for selecting a year and coding errors (both in JavaScript and the back-end software) that cannot understand that January can follow December.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Dates and times are circular? Well, so long as you ignore more-significant date components.

FYI, Javascript has a Date object.

David7738

In reply to W3bbo

#Oct 19th @ 2:42 PM

It all depends upon how you determine time.. Time itself is not circular just the units within a date are circlular. 200901011900Z (yyyymmddHHmm) and 201001010001Z leaves no confusion (Z = Zulu Time == UTC) or even year|dayofyear|time + TZ reference (or using standardized UTC) leaves no confusion and can be sorted or a simple algorigthm can be used for comparision purposes. Anything else is laziness

Matthew van Eerde
AKA Maurits

> 1300 is both before and after 1700

For some reason I looked at that and thought years, not hhmm.

exoteric
I : Next<I>

In reply to David7738

#Oct 19th @ 2:58 PM

Reminds me of Brian's clock monoid: adding modulo 12, throwing away the rest. "It's a monoid, stupid!" - now there's a line you may not be able to get away with.

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

Time can be circular if (Pick all that apply):

1) Your stuck going round a black hole twisted into a white hole.

2) Your Bill Murry and its ground hogs day.

3) You read "Special Relativity" backwards.

4) Your stuck in a round-about at 5:00pm.

4) You overflow DateTime and start back from MinValue.

"Wen you view it from the highest dimension, there is no time and no space, nor any future or past, and that it is all happening in one fascinating expression and that time is an illusion that has purpose." -- Edgar Cayce