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Re: RE: Re: Bug in FromDate

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg49171] Re: [mg49143] RE: [mg49130] Re: [mg48903] Bug in FromDate
  • From: DrBob <drbob at bigfoot.com>
  • Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 03:33:37 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <200407050854.EAA14739@smc.vnet.net>
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Well said, Hartmut!

Bobby

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004 04:54:22 -0400 (EDT), Wolf, Hartmut <Hartmut.Wolf at t-systems.com> wrote:

>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Sébastien de Menten [mailto:sdementen at hotmail.com]
To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
>> Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 8:02 AM
>> To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
>> Subject: [mg49171] [mg49143] [mg49130] Re: [mg48903] Bug in FromDate
>>
>>
>>>>> I am using FromDate with arguments outside the usual scope but don't
>>>>> get any sensible result.
>>>
>>> Why should you?
>>>
>>
>> Because sometimes it may be quite handy to be able to say: the date 20
>> months after the day d with just ToDate[FromDate[d + {0,20,0,0,0,0}]].
>>
>> In fact, this is the behaviour of the mktime function of the
>> standard C
>> library (allow any range in the different time fields year,
>> month,etc and
>> normalise them in mktime).
>>
>>
> [...]
>
> Handy, perhaps, but you should know what you're doing then! So what is
>
>     {2004,3,30,17,15,58} - 1 Month  ?
>     {2004,3,30,17,15,58} + 1 Month  ?
>     {2004,3,30,17,15,58} - 1 Month + 1 Month ?
>     {2004,3,30,17,15,58} - 13 Month + 13 Month ?
>
> The desired results seem to be dependend on culture, e.g. of banking account bankers, payroll payers, insurance police insurers -- and all that would be completely OK! (They have their answers.) But what a mess, if they were dependend on C-libraries, Perl-functions, etc...?  Mathematica hopefully wouldn'd line up there.
>
> After all, it's easy to write an application function, but specify it first!
>
> --
> Hartmut Wolf
>
>



-- 
DrBob at bigfoot.com
www.eclecticdreams.net


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