On Wednesday, March 09, 2011 09:28:50 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Doesn't std.datetime have function for easily formatting dates and times?

It currently has very specific formats that it - such as ISO and ISO Extended. It does _not_ currently have any functions where you do something like give it a string to tell it how to format the date or time. I _do_ intend to add such functions at some point, but if you want really good ones that do that sort of thing, it takes a fair bit of design. I didn't want to take the time to do that when I wrote std.datetime (there was plenty of other stuff to worry about), and I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 9 mar 2011, at 20:18, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

> On Wednesday, March 09, 2011 09:28:05 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> On 9 mar 2011, at 05:52, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>> On Tuesday 08 March 2011 20:46:49 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>> I understand. If I could, I'd kindly discourage you from working on it. Its existence would stifle the impetus to work on general lexing and parsing frameworks (a la highly integrated lex/yacc using D's generational capabilities). Those in turn would push the compiler forward and would help fixing bugs, and would offer the proverbial fishing rod (tools for parsing any language) instead of fish (a lexer and a parser for D itself).
>>> 
>>> Well, I fully support a generic lexer, but I also see value in a lexer which closely follows what the front end is doing for D. But it's not like I've been making huge progress on it and am about to submit it for review. I have too much other stuff on my plate to blow through it like that.
>>> 
>>> Though honestly, if I were to be writing a lexer and/or parser for a compiler of any kind, I'd just do it by hand. It's a lot more flexible that way. So, even if a solid, generic D lexing tool existed, I'm not sure that I'd use it for anything.
>>> 
>>> In any case, as I understood it, the result of that original discussion was that we wanted to have a generic lexing solution (and presumably a corresponding parsing solution following that) but that we still want a lexer and parser for D which are close to what the C++ front end is doing. So, as requested, I've slowly been working on that.
>>> 
>>> - Jonathan M Davis
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> dmd-internals mailing list
>>> dmd-internals at puremagic.com
>>> http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals
>> 
>> I completely agree with this, that we need a D lexer (preferably a whole frontend) written in D, included in the standard library. I even hope that one day DMD will use that lexer.
>> 
>> BTW, are basing your work on DDMD?
> 
> No. I haven't looked at DDMD. Walter wanted a fairly direct port of the C++ frontend (with appropriate tweaks for D, but he wants to make sure that it's straightforward to port fixes from one to the other). So, I've just been directly, porting the C++ frontend, adjusting it to be somewhat more idiomatic D as appropriate but generally keeping it fairly close to the C++ implementation.
> 
> - Jonathan M davis
> _______________________________________________
> dmd-internals mailing list
> dmd-internals at puremagic.com
> http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals

Well, that exactly what DDMD does.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

Ok, I see.
-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 9 mar 2011, at 20:21, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

> On Wednesday, March 09, 2011 09:28:50 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> Doesn't std.datetime have function for easily formatting dates and times?
> 
> It currently has very specific formats that it - such as ISO and ISO Extended. It does _not_ currently have any functions where you do something like give it a string to tell it how to format the date or time. I _do_ intend to add such functions at some point, but if you want really good ones that do that sort of thing, it takes a fair bit of design. I didn't want to take the time to do that when I wrote std.datetime (there was plenty of other stuff to worry about), and I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.
> 
> - Jonathan M Davis
> _______________________________________________
> dmd-internals mailing list
> dmd-internals at puremagic.com
> http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals

On Wednesday, March 09, 2011 13:00:25 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 9 mar 2011, at 20:18, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > On Wednesday, March 09, 2011 09:28:05 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> >> On 9 mar 2011, at 05:52, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> >>> On Tuesday 08 March 2011 20:46:49 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >>>> I understand. If I could, I'd kindly discourage you from working on it. Its existence would stifle the impetus to work on general lexing and parsing frameworks (a la highly integrated lex/yacc using D's generational capabilities). Those in turn would push the compiler forward and would help fixing bugs, and would offer the proverbial fishing rod (tools for parsing any language) instead of fish (a lexer and a parser for D itself).
> >>> 
> >>> Well, I fully support a generic lexer, but I also see value in a lexer which closely follows what the front end is doing for D. But it's not like I've been making huge progress on it and am about to submit it for review. I have too much other stuff on my plate to blow through it like that.
> >>> 
> >>> Though honestly, if I were to be writing a lexer and/or parser for a compiler of any kind, I'd just do it by hand. It's a lot more flexible that way. So, even if a solid, generic D lexing tool existed, I'm not sure that I'd use it for anything.
> >>> 
> >>> In any case, as I understood it, the result of that original discussion was that we wanted to have a generic lexing solution (and presumably a corresponding parsing solution following that) but that we still want a lexer and parser for D which are close to what the C++ front end is doing. So, as requested, I've slowly been working on that.
> >>> 
> >>> - Jonathan M Davis
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> dmd-internals mailing list
> >>> dmd-internals at puremagic.com
> >>> http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals
> >> 
> >> I completely agree with this, that we need a D lexer (preferably a whole frontend) written in D, included in the standard library. I even hope that one day DMD will use that lexer.
> >> 
> >> BTW, are basing your work on DDMD?
> > 
> > No. I haven't looked at DDMD. Walter wanted a fairly direct port of the C++ frontend (with appropriate tweaks for D, but he wants to make sure that it's straightforward to port fixes from one to the other). So, I've just been directly, porting the C++ frontend, adjusting it to be somewhat more idiomatic D as appropriate but generally keeping it fairly close to the C++ implementation.
> > 
> > - Jonathan M davis
> > _______________________________________________
> > dmd-internals mailing list
> > dmd-internals at puremagic.com
> > http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals
> 
> Well, that exactly what DDMD does.

Well, I may look at it at some point then, but I'd first have to get permission from whoever it is that works on that due to the difference in license. I have permission to port Walter's C++ code to D and put it under Boost, but that permission doesn't cover code which is derived from it. Also, it's not like I can quite take what they did in ddmd  anyway, since the interface to using the lexer is going to be different (though presumably, most of the ddmd code would still work mostly as-is if they haven't changed it much).

However, since I really should be properly understanding the lexer to get this right anyway, and since by far the best way to do that is port it, I'm more or less inclined to just port it. I'll much better understand what changes need to be made to make it properly work with a range API and whatever is else appropriate for a D lexer in Phobos which is divorced from the compiler itself if I actually do the work to port it myself.

- Jonathan M Davis