I also ran into this when attempting to use IP addresses. The solution I came up with was to make the address a list of floats like 192 168 0 1. I think it's more useful to do this with dates as well: a list 2006 6 12 12 0 0 is much easier to manipulate in pd than a symbol, which would need its own external to parse. I wrote a timestamp external a few months ago that outputs a list of floats as [year month day hour minute second millisecond] but I have a horrible feeling the only copy is on a dead hard drive :(. It's easy enough to reconstruct though.
Martin
Quoting Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@eds.org:
Since Pd only has 19bits of integer resolution, we can't use UNIX time within Pd. So I was thinking that perhaps ISO format would would well in Pd since its a symbol:
For example:
Today is 2006-06-12. This email was sent written at 12:40:23. All of this can be lumped together as 20060612T124023. I am not sure if this ISO unified date/time format officially supports fractional seconds, but since it does support fractional seconds in the time (12:40:23.2342), and the digit positions are fixed, so I think we can easily just tack on fractional seconds like this: 20060612T124023.2342. I think keeping the "." is preferable since ISO 8601 says 12:40:23.2342 can be shorted to 124023.2342, but I didn't see mention of 1240232342.
One problem is that ISO 8601 allows you to omit the separators "-" and ":", which would then make it a float in Pd, and therefore it would be truncated to 6 digits. So we couldn't support that.
Here's a page all about ISO 8601 date/time formats:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html#time
Thoughts? Comments? Flames? ;)
.hc
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