From: Daniel DeLorme <dan-ml@...42.com>
Date: 2007-08-23T09:12:58+09:00
Subject: Re: time class changed in ruby-1.8.6?

Florian Frank wrote:
> Daniel DeLorme wrote:
>> You're probably using rails.
> 
> No, I am not. Maybe Mr. Ball did.

Of course, I meant the OP

> I think Ruby without Rails should also be able to handle dates and times 
> well. When I implemented those methods myself, I wondered if anyone uses 
> all these classes at all, because so much was missing to make them 
> useful. And if everybody keeps monkey patching the missing methods, it's 
> no wonder, that things break, if the standard library changes again.

100% agree. In addition to date/time conversion I've also found it 
annoyingly difficult and clunky to work with multiple timezones. 
Date/time classes should be 1st-class citizens of the ruby core but 
instead they are relegated to the stdlib or 3rd-party libraries. I dream 
of the day when we could have automatic Time <=> DateTime conversion 
(like Fixnum <=> Bignum) and natural timezone handling. I love how ruby 
makes everything seem effortless and natural, but date/time handling is 
unfortunately a sore spot. :-/

Daniel