The classes dealing with date and those dealing with time have almost the same construction. At the top of the hierarchy are the constants and the notion of value (TIME_VALUE, DATE_VALUE, DATE_TIME_VALUE). From this notion come two kinds of heirs which are the absolute notion of time (classes DATE, TIME and DATE_TIME) and the notion of duration (classes DATE_DURATION, TIME_DURATION, DATE_TIME_DURATION).
DATE, TIME and DATE_TIME inherit from the deferred class ABSOLUTE. It implies that instances of these classes are used as absolutes. We can imagine an oriented axis on which are reported values. ABSOLUTE inherits COMPARABLE, there is a complete order inside the class and its heir. ABSOLUTE is a client of DURATION, so that each instance of ABSOLUTE is linked with the duration between the origin and itself.
The default way to compare absolute objects is to compare their respective duration to each other.
TIME deals with hour, minute and second. Is is possible to use more precision for time (there is no limit inside the class). See More precision in TIME for documentation. This section deals only with second.
There are three ways to create an instance of the class TIME: by choosing the time (make), by getting the time from the system (make_now), or by choosing the number of seconds elapsed from the origin (make_by_seconds). The arguments of make and make_by_seconds have to respect the range of a day (see preconditions).
The origin is 0 hour 0 minute and 0 second. Notion of time is relative to a day in a cyclic representation: days begin at 0:0:0 and end at 23:59:59. If a second is added to 23:59:59 then the result will be 0:0:0. Subtracting a minute to 0:0:0 will yield 23:59:0.
Instances of TIME may be compared. Functions <, + > and >= are available. Function is_equal must be use to test equality. = will compare references.
The duration linked to an instance of TIME (attribute duration) is an instance of TIME_DURATION. It is the duration from the origin until the current time. The function seconds returns the number of seconds since the origin. This function may be useful to get the number of seconds between two events. The feature - creates an interval between two instances of TIME. The duration of this interval is given by the function duration. However, this duration is not canonical (See Duration for precisions). In TIME, the feature relative_duration returns the same duration, but more efficiently and also it is canonical.
DATE deals with year, month and day. It is more complicated since there is no regular period in dates: each month contains its own total of days and there are leap years. That is why some peculiarities appear while manipulating objects of this class. There is no limit for a date (inside the class). The only limit comes from INTEGER representation. If INTEGER size is 32 bits (most common case), and as long as the basic unit is a day, the range for a date is from (- 2^31) to 2^31 (days), i.e. 5.8 million years from the origin.
There are also three ways to create an instance of the class DATE: by choosing the date (make, make_month_day_year, make_day_month_year), by getting the date from the system (make_now), or by choosing the number of days elapsed from the origin (make_by_days). The arguments of each creation procedure have to respect the common range (See preconditions).
The origin is 01/01/1600.
Instances of DATE may be compared. Functions <, + > and >= are available. Function is_equal must be use to test equality, = will compare references.
Each instance of DATE has a function (duration) which returns the duration since the origin until the current date (it is an instance of DATE_DURATION). This duration is definite, i.e. it contains only days (See below). However, it may be useful to deal directly with days (no need of DATE_DURATION). In this case, the function days of DATE yields the number of days since origin.
Much information may be gotten from functions written in this part. Most of them are used within the class, but they are exported at the same time.
DATE operations looks like TIME operations:
For example, date1 is April 20th and date2 is May 28th. Both features will yield instances of DURATION; however, relative_duration will yield 1 month and 8 days whereas definite_duration will yield 38 days.
The aim is to gather the time with the date. DATE_TIME is client of TIME and DATE (see inheritance relation). Some features from DATE and TIME are re-written since they are useful within the class. Many other features may be called indirectly with the correct attribute (time or date).
There are still several ways to create an instance:
The attribute date is set with the same reference as the argument (See comment of the previous section).
To make it easier calls to features of TIME and DATE, the most useful access features are written as features in DATE_TIME (days, seconds and their associated duration date_duration and time_duration).
Instances of DATE_TIME are totally ordered (the class inherit from ABSOLUTE). Functions <, + > and >= are available. Function is_equal must be used to test equality, = will compare references.
Function duration gathers functions duration from the attributes time and date. The result is an instance of DATE_TIME_DURATION.
It is possible to change reference of time and date with the features set_time and set_date. To change only one element (for example hour), features from TIME or DATE have to be used.
Addition of hours, minutes and seconds are available directly in the class. The reason is that adding one second may have a consequence on the date. Using second_add from TIME is also possible but the date will not be modified in the case time makes a cycle. It is of course the same for minute and hour. day_add is also available directly since it is frequently used within the class.
Features + and add take an instance of DATE_TIME_DURATION in arguments. The date duration is added first then the time duration. Adding the time duration first would have yield some different result as in this example: the current date is August 30th 23:59:59. The duration to add is one month and one second. Feature add returns October 1st 0:0:0, whereas adding the second first would return September 30th 0:0:0! The same difference occurs with leap years.
Feature relative_duration and definite_duration returns the duration between the current date (with time) and the argument. The first one returns a result which is canonical (see definitions below), while the second one returns a result definite but may be not canonical. It is the same notion than in DATE.
Another way to process would have been to make DATE_TIME inherit from DATE, as long as DATE_TIME is a DATE, with more precision. The choice was to have a client relation between them. Otherwise DATE should have known the existence of DATE_TIME, and many assignment attempts would have been useful in features such as infix +. So DATE_TIME is client of DATE.
However, it could be useful to mix instances of DATE of DATE_TIME. As DATE_TIME is client of DATE with its attribute date, it is easy to get only the date from instances of DATE_TIME. On the other way features are available to convert objects from DATE to DATE_TIME. In class DATE, feature to_date_time builds an instance of DATE_TIME with the origin of time (0,0,0). In the class DATE_TIME, the creation procedure make_by_date has the same effect. (The same feature exists for duration, replacing origin by zero).