Time, to me, is the canonical example of "things that people think should be easy, aren't". It has everything - complex, constantly changing "business" rules, exceptions generated essentially randomly by a shadowy cabal[1] nobody's ever heard of, "impossible" situations like the 11 days that never happened and other technically arbitrary calendar edits[2], multiple silly base conversions, really weird rules for picking certain dates[3], lots of opportunities for making fencepost errors, and lots of other things.
Which leads me to my rule with time programming: Never fail to use a solid library, unless you're unfortunate enough to be writing one.
This[4] is a great, necessary but not sufficient book if you have to do that.
Which leads me to my rule with time programming: Never fail to use a solid library, unless you're unfortunate enough to be writing one.
This[4] is a great, necessary but not sufficient book if you have to do that.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Calendrical-Calculations-Nachum-Dersh...
A good reference for anyone who has to write calendar related code is the book "Calendrical Calculations" by Dershowitz and Reingold [1].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Calendrical-Calculations-Nachum-Dersh...