Re: Shorter and more flexible implementation for parse-time.el

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> writes:

> On Sun, 2021-07-25T16:38, Guu, Jin-Cheng <jcguu95@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> And you're totally right, date parsing as a whole won't be easy. In
>> general we would hope for a parser that is smart enough to deal with
>> flexible formats. However, some specification needs to be given at
>> some point - for example "01/01/01". That is why I came up with an
>> assumption that I think is general enough but also can have a definite
>> output.
>
> The right way to solve the date parsing problem is by getting everyone
> on ISO-8601, not by learning to parse every existing format.
>
> https://xkcd.com/1179/

Indeed, but as we have seen with other standards that will probably
not happen out lifetimes. Americans are still measuring in inches and
Englishman in yars, despite both signing SI convention long, long time
ago ... :).

How interesting/prospectful would it be to get (optional) elisp binding
for the icu library?

https://github.com/unicode-org/icu

http://site.icu-project.org/

It offers lots of translations, date formats, and other locale things.

ICU is likely to be installed on most of desktops since lots of other
software use it, and it has support for binding from C.

Alternatively one can transform their database into something usable
form Emacs, but it's probably more work and would be duplication of the
database which probably is installed somewhere on users computer
anyway.