Re: atoms, molecules

[Kohsuke KAWAGUCHI <kohsuke.kawaguchi@eng.sun.com>]

> It seems as if regular expressions could be used not just for validation of 
> typed content, but for fragmentation of typed molecules into smaller 
> atoms.  Instead of binding users to a particular (ISO 8601) date format, 
> this approach would let users provide their own rules for fragmenting date 
> strings into the parts we need for processing - year, month, day, etc.

One of the problem of this approach is that you can't specify order
relation and equality relation. And date/time is utterly useless without
them (it is ironic that the current date/time types are also broken with
respect to order/equality relation)

How would you define 24hours=1day, or 2minutes < 150 seconds in your
atom/molecule model?

--
Kohsuke KAWAGUCHI                          +1 650 786 0721
Sun Microsystems                   kohsuke.kawaguchi@eng.sun.com