Re: A proposed enhancement in entering timestamps

[Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr>]

Hello,

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> On 2016-03-18, at 17:51, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:
>
>> I'm now reading org-read-date-analyze to be able to enable US military
>> format for hours (e.g., 2100 instead of 21:00).  This is potentially
>> very useful (at least for me), since I'll be able to enter the hour with
>> one hand (colon is on shift-semicolon on my keyboard).  Another idea
>> would be to enable 21.00 (this notation is sometimes used in Poland).
>> Would there be demand for such a feature?
>
> Hi all,
>
> and thanks Eric and Sam for positive feedback.

I agree that US military format can be interesting. However, I think
21.00 could conflict with European format for dates.

> One thing that would tremendously help is tests.  I think these
> functions are rather fragile, in the sense that it's very easy to break
> something (`parse-time-string' is a total mess, for example - it is
> "clever", yes, but proving that it actually works seems next to
> impossible), so without an extensive test suite I wouldn't touch these
> functions.  Does anyone have - or can make - a set of valid (in
> `org-read-date' sense) strings to make tests first and then modify these
> functions?  (I could make it myself, but I might forget about some cases -
> and there are a lot of them!  And it's even nontrivial to test the
> coverage, since large part of the `parse-time-string' /logic/ is hidden
> in the /variable/ `parse-time-rules', which btw has a 1-line
> docstring...)

I cannot speak for `parse-time-string', but `org-read-date' already has
some tests in `test-org/org-read-date'. You can add more if you want to.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou