a little more on datetime

[Timothy Miller]

Greetings,

As Jacque recently mentioned, RR is inconsistent in the way it copes 
with dates and times, when interpreting, sorting or converting 
values. How true!

As far as I can tell, the IDE will appear to sort datetime or convert 
from one dateTime format to another, without producing an error 
message, regardless of the value in question. It will do so in cases 
where the value is almost, but not quite completely unlike a date or 
a time. If the IDE cannot understand the value as a date or time, it 
sorts as if the value were alphanumeric, or ignores the convert 
command.

In addition, it will report a value is a date, but then refuse to 
recognize the same value as a date when converting or sorting.

Try this:

on mouseUp
   put "      11/24/96" into var1
   answer (var1 is a date)
   convert var1 to seconds
   answer the result
   answer var1
end mouseUp

At least on my machine and version, the IDE reports the value is a 
date, but then refuses to convert it, or converts it incorrectly. The 
result is empty.

This example even stranger:

on mouseUp
   put "         11/24/96" & cr & "avfdt" into var1
   answer (var1 is a date)
   convert var1 to seconds
   answer the result
   answer var1
end mouseUp


The IDE says the value in the second example is also a number, but it 
ignores the same leading spaces AND the second line, AND correctly 
converts the first line, leading spaces and all, to seconds! The 
result is still empty.

The second example suggests a handy hack if you want to force the IDE 
to correctly interpret certain badly formatted dates or times. Just 
ad a cr and some nonsense characters in the second line. I'm mostly 
joking...

Maybe this is all as it must be, for obscure reasons. Still, it seems 
to me the user needs a break here. A small and likely easy step would 
be for the IDE to give the user a result, if the user cares to take 
advantage of it. "Ambiguous dateTime value" other such words might be 
helpful in some cases. "Value not in dateTime format" and "value 
contains multiple lines" are other possibilities.

The IDE seems to be making these determinations anyway, but not reporting them.

Is this is a bad idea?

Cheers,


Tim