Req11: International date literals

re: Req11: International date literals

Jer0enH — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:11:35 GMT

I disagree that this is only rarely used. Of course you don't use hard-coded dates in most production code, but as others have said it's quite common in test code!

re: Req11: International date literals

Krzysztof Maczyński — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:27:08 GMT

Months in the middle. The US format isn't naturally sortable. That results in perceived weirdness by others.

Wasn't VB up to 6 more liberal about what you pot between the #s?

re: Req11: International date literals

Richard — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:15:21 GMT

I too think there should be a single format (namely ISO's #yyyy-mm-dd#) to which old-style dates should be auto-corrected.

re: Req11: International date literals

Kyralessa — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:15:34 GMT

I like the idea OK. What about autocorrecting "old format" dates into "new format" ones? So if you put in #5/4/2008# (in the US), when you moved off the line it would correct to #2008-05-04#.

I agree with those who say it's not a huge priority, though; obviously with the DateTime class there's already a way to do this sort of thing.

re: Req11: International date literals

Héctor — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:00:52 GMT

Also found this to be a pain in the past, however, I agree that it is not a common scenario, so it should be considered, but as a low priority.

re: Req11: International date literals

Kevin Ryall — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 03:55:43 GMT

This is a persistent annoyance for us non-US programmers (although to be fair, VB is far from alone in assuming that the US locale is the only one that counts). I don’t want to use our European date format either – if we could use an ambiguous format like ISO 8601 that would be perfect.

While I very rarely have embedded date literals in production code, I have them very frequently in test code – and it’s a real pain to have to use US date formats (timespan constructors aren’t as readable as native date literals would be).

re: Req11: International date literals

Tim — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:11:29 GMT

@Đonny: The ISO format is definately less confusing, since all standard time formats that start with the year and use "-" as seperators iterate from the largest to the lowest value. (yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss) It is the only time format that really is obvious.

re: Req11: International date literals

MarkJ — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:56:53 GMT

Yes please, we have good reasons to have a few hardcoded dates in our programs, and this is a pain.

re: Req11: International date literals

Đonny — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:41:42 GMT

I'd really more appretiate TimeSpan literals than change in DateTime literals. Hardcoding dates into program is IMO more rare than hardcoding of times - and there's no confusion about TimeSpan formating internationally.

IMO ISO format is not less confusing than US one. Is it YYYY-dd-MM or YYYY-MM-dd?

(Somebody from Czech Republic - native date format d.M. YYYY H:mm:ss)

re: Req11: International date literals

Jonathan Allen — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 04:20:31 GMT

Timespan literals would be very, very helpful for constants and optional parameters.

What I thinkwe really need is a generalized way to define literals for value types for use in constants and optional parameters.