Representing ambiguity in datetime?

[Ivan Van Laningham]

Hi All--

Ron Adam wrote:
> 
> John Machin wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 17 May 2005 17:38:30 -0500, Terry Hancock
> > <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>What do you do when a date or time is
> >>incompletely specified? 

> > The reason the ranges for the month and day specifiers begin
> with zero is that MySQL allows incomplete dates such as
> '2004-00-00' to be stored as of MySQL 3.23.
> 
> So it seems using 0's for the missing day or month may be how to do it.
> 

This is somewhat the approach I took in order to allow users to specify
an incomplete Mayan date in order to list possibilities.  But instead of
0 (which is a valid entry in most Mayan date components), I used None. 
The web version can be found at

http://www.pauahtun.org/Calendar/tools.html (the "Search for Matching
Dates" button)

The paper describing the incomplete Mayan date tool is at: 
http://www.pauahtun.org/python_vuh.html

Metta,
Ivan
----------------------------------------------
Ivan Van Laningham
God N Locomotive Works
http://www.andi-holmes.com/
http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/proceedings.html
Army Signal Corps:  Cu Chi, Class of '70
Author:  Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours