[PD-dev] common date format for Pd

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jun 12, 2006, at 7:37 PM, martinrp at alcor.concordia.ca wrote:

> Quoting Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org>:
>
>>
>> Yeah, I guess that makes sense to avoid symbols.  In which case, it
>> probably makes sense to split up the UNIX time_t into two numbers,
>> the first is the date in days, the maximum being 49,710 days, then
>> the time of day in seconds, the maximum being 86,400 seconds, then
>> the number of fractional seconds as a float (eg. 0.023414)
>>
>
> It seems way more logical to me to split it into years and day of  
> year at
> least.
> Of course we could work with katuns and tuns like the Maya, it's  
> arguably a
> more
> rational system ;).
> Martin
>
>
>> It seems to me that breaking up the time into each component leads to
>> some very long lists, so this method would be more compact.  The
>> parsing of this format could easily be done with Pd core.
>
> A 7-component list is too much for pd?

Not at all.  But dealing with 7 component lists means a lot of cord  
connections, which is not so fun.  I just wrote a [stat] object to  
get info from files.  It outputs access-time, modification-time, and  
status-change-time.  That's 18 elements instead of 6, plus there are  
already 7 other properties output.

Plus I think its a neat breakdown the first element in days is equal  
to the date, so today is 13312, which is exactly equal to  
2006-06-13.  Right now, its 39325, which converts perfectly to  
10:55:25.  Then one more number for microseconds (since Pd can only  
do up to 6 digits).  It seems quite clean to me, considering the  
limitations.

.hc


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