Age & Anniversary Calculations

[Ken Corey]

On 21/05/2012 08:02, Igor de Oliveira Couto wrote:
> What is the 'best' way to perform these 2 calculations with LiveCode?

'convert' just rocks.  Here's a couple of throwaways to show you how I'd 
approach it.  They probably aren't exactly what you need, but you'll get 
the idea.

> 1) Calculate a person's age, given a birthdate:

This one is a pain, as I ran it on Windows, and birthdays before 1970 
weren't natively handled.  I think this does the trick.
-------------------
on mouseUp
    -- put the birthday into tBd,
    -- on windows, can't do before 1970!
    put "May 21 1965" into tBd

    -- handle < 1970 (is this just on windows?)
    set the itemdel to " "
    put item 3 of tBd into tBYear
    if tBYear < 12 then
       add 2000 to tBYear
    else if tBYear < 100 then
       add 1900 to tBYear
    end if
    put 0 into tBYearOffset

    if tBYear < 1970 then
       put 1970 - tBYear into tBYearOffset
       put 1970 into item 3 of tBd
    end if

    -- back to out regularly scheduled code
    set the itemdel to ","
    convert tBd to dateItems
    if the result is not empty then
       put "Got an error:"&the result
    else
       put the long time into tNow
       convert tNow to dateItems

       subtract tBYearOffset from item 1 of tBd

       put item 1 of tNow - item 1 of tBd into tBirthdays
       answer "You've had "&tBirthdays&" birthdays."
    end if
end mouseUp
-------------------

> 2) Calculate whether an *anniversary* falls within a time frame - ie., within a week, within 2 weeks, within a month of today:

Something like this perhaps (written as in a button script)...watch out 
for wrapping:
-------------------
on mouseUp
    -- get now as 2012,5,21,9,12,20,2 - today's date/time/day number
    put the long time into tNow
    convert  tNow to dateItems

    -- find out this year's anniversary, replace '7' and '8' as needed
    put tNow into tAnniv
    put 6 into item 2 of tAnniv
    put 8 into item 3 of tAnniv

    -- find out distance between...
    convert tNow to seconds
    convert tAnniv to seconds
    put tAnniv - tNow into tDiff
    if tDiff < 0 then
       answer "Already passed!"
    else
       convert tDiff to dateItems
       answer "it's in "&item 2 of tDiff&" months, "&item 3 of tDiff \
	&" days, "&item 4 of tDiff&" hours."
    end if

    -- difference is shown as - 1970,2,18,0,0,0,4
    -- Ignore the year, as we purposely
end mouseUp
-------------------

Hope this helps.

-Ken