I finally got a chance to play with DateTime.pm tonight. Its the manifestation of a several year long campaign first started by the Reefknot folks, to get Perl a standard Date and Time module. (as opposed to the 50+ conflicting, and overlapping solutions we have now)

Initial work that autarch (aka Dave Rolsky of Mason, and Alzabo fame) has done is amazing! Its a rationale, clean, api to date manipulation, thats easy to building on top of (Matts has gutted his popular Time::Piece, and turned it into to a DateTime wrapper), has support (or at least hooks) for internationalization, and the most comprehensive timezone support I’ve ever seen. (they even support floating timezones!)

That said, its definitely pre-release, and I ran into a few bugs tonight, mostly relating to timezones which are offsets rather then named. (which are the kind I was working with as I was playing with RSS and that means W3CDTF) Patches are in the mail. (1, 2, 3, 4)

Rich Bowen

Expressing times and dates in any reasonable way sucks. A lot. The person who came up with a system in which we have 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, 7 days, (28..31) days, and 12 months as our units needs to be beaten with a yardstick.

Yeah!