[tap-l] TAP Datetime discussion

[Eric Wilhelm]

# from Michael G Schwern
# on Thursday 06 September 2007 10:22 pm:

>And the proposal is here:
>http://testanything.org/wiki/index.php/TAP_datetime

It's not clear from that what the intended usage of this datetime is.  
It sounds like:

1.  TAP-level metadata (e.g. stream and test start/end times.)
2.  TAP diagnostics.

With #1, it's specified in the grammar.  Thus, the producer and consumer 
have agreed in advance that a given key (e.g. "harness_start_time") 
will be in that format.

But #2 is arbitrary user data.  This means the datetime format has no 
meaning unless it is identified as such.  The example demonstrates this 
weakness:

   not ok 1 - date of the par-tay
     ---
     found:  2007-09-01
     wanted: 2007-09-02
     ...

That's fine if the recommendation pertains to #2 only in terms of making 
dates and times consistently readable for the user.  But, as far as 
parsing is concerned, a datetime stored in an arbitrary key is only a 
string unless it is identified.  If the #2 case intends to be more 
ambitious, some sort of typing is needed.

  !TAP::datetime 2007-09-01

I doubt ^-- that is it.  Maybe just a string "date(2007-09-01)" or 
whatever (or not.)

--Eric
-- 
"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many
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