RE: Date::Calc

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RE: RE: Date::Calc by lhoward (Vicar) on Sep 12, 2000 at 00:11 UTC
I must disagree. Many people feel that Date::Calc is big and clunky. It is large, but the job it is performing it complicated and intricate. If performance is of maximal importance then I agree that you would be better off rolling a high-performance date routine that is custom-tailored to your needs (but if performance is your #1 concern, you probably shouldn't be using Perl either). However, if reliability and correctness of your code is important, then you should use Date::Calc. If you have spent any time doing serious date logic, you will understand the benefits of using a well-tested, full-featured library of date routines such as Date::Calc. Why re-invent the wheel, especially if you don't have to. Date arithmetic is particularly nasty (if you want to know just how nasty, check out Calenderical Calculations by Dershowitz and Reingold) and very easy to get wrong or introduce subtle errors. Heed my advice and always try Date::Calc (or another well-written and properly tested date module) before falling-back and writing your own.	[reply]
RE: RE: RE: Date::Calc by Anonymous Monk on Oct 28, 2000 at 00:09 UTC
I must disagree with lhoward, who disagreed :-). Since Date::Calc is internally written in C, it is probably much faster than anything you could roll yourself, in Perl. -- Steffen Beyer sb@engelschall.com	[reply]
RE: RE: Date::Calc by Anonymous Monk on Oct 28, 2000 at 00:06 UTC
Actually, there are people who reported to me that they prefer to use Date::Calc instead of Date::Manip, because Date::Calc is more compact, takes less time to load and is faster (because it is written in C, internally) than Date::Manip, even though Date::Manip is more powerful for instance in parsing dates (natural language constructs are possible) and in calculations involving business days. -- Steffen Beyer sb@engelschall.com	[reply]
Re: RE: Date::Calc by Graham (Deacon) on Jun 13, 2001 at 15:58 UTC
On the contary, it is huge and clunky because it is so fully featured. We use it extensively within our applications because of this and positively welcome and would willingly assist with future enhancements.	[reply]
RE: RE: Date::Calc by Maclir (Curate) on Sep 12, 2000 at 02:15 UTC
I believe you only need to "use" the particular conversions relevant to your needs.	[reply]
Re^2: Date::Calc by ostbey (Initiate) on Oct 09, 2009 at 06:07 UTC
Date/Manip.pm v5.54: 240908 Bytes Date/Pcalc.pm v6.0: 98112 Bytes Date/Calc.so v6.0: 125005 Bytes All under FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE AMD64 with Perl compile-time options (among others) USE_64_BIT_ALL and USE_64_BIT_INT.	[reply]