Stewart, Robert wrote:
Thomas Lemm wrote:
I am happily using the boost date_time library and I plan to extend it towards including quarters as new (gregorian) date durations, just the way months are included already (excluding parsing of quarters)
Why excluding parsing? That would imply only partial support relative to other durations, right?
What are the chances that his change might make it into the boost date_time library?
Jeff Garland will need to answer that.
Is there some interest in this feature, if so I would provide a patch to update source and documentation to include the quarters as a new duration.
I think it would be a great addition.
Well, so quarters turns out to be like months as far as durations go -- that is, it's mathematical like days and weeks. So the big drawback you face is dealing with the associated "fuzzy math". For example, what's the result of date("2008-Feb-28") + quarters(1) = ? date("2008-Feb-27") + quarters(1) = ? Month durations play some games to handle this problem (see docs for details) which quarters could adopt. But if you adopt the month rules than I don't thing you buy much more than simply writing const months quarters = months(3); There's also an argument against adding quarters as a duration. I have an app somewhere in which I have quarter defined as a date_period so I could write: date_period q = quarter(2009, 1); To me at least this seems like the more likely application. Jeff