Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: CNews - now a pedantic software! : -(
Message-ID: <1991Apr3.191210.1543@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1991 19:12:10 GMT
References: <3NIP9ZB@methan.chemie.fu-berlin.de> <27F63B37.CFD@tct.com> <1991Apr02.183535.13886@buster.stafford.tx.us> <1991Apr3.001125.2057@zoo.toronto.edu> <3313@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <3313@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
>... While a date containing, for instance, 91 and 04, is obviously
>parsable into day of the month and year, that won't be true shortly.

Note that RFC822/1036 has never legitimized such dates, and C News now
refuses to accept them.  Dates like "04/05/91" have *never* been parsable
unambiguously.

>  This is almost like the fields in RFC1036 (as I remember, I have to
>get a new copy), except the year...

RFC1123 amended RFC822, and by proxy RFC1036, to allow four-digit years
and strongly encourage them.

>... and therefore order is no longer
>important. This seems like a wonderful idea...

If you look closely at the current C News distribution, you'll find that
such routines are in fact already provided.  The "Date:" header parsing
uses a more rigorous (and faster) version that wants to see an RFC822/1036
date, though, because of our observation that essentially all "Date:"
headers already contained standard-format dates.  A wonderful idea it
may be, but it's pretty much unnecessary in this particular context.

One reason for including the more liberal parser, by the way, is that
we want to get rid of getdate() entirely before too long, and we need
something to parse "Expires:" headers.  *Those* are much more variable,
because they are manually typed rather than automatically generated.
The plan is to accept any unambiguous (note that word: unambiguous,
which means none of this "04/05/91" garbage) date there.
-- 
"The stories one hears about putting up | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
SunOS 4.1.1 are all true."  -D. Harrison|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry