[Bioperl-l] Bio::Seq::GenEMBLI proposal

[Ewan Birney]

On Mon, 18 Dec 2000, Paul Gordon wrote:

> > Decisions:
> > 
> >   (a) should we keep with the each_ syntax, or would people prefer
> > "something returing an array of things" to have a different naming
> > convention?
> > 
> >   
> >   (b) should date's be formatted strings or something else? (if so, what?)
> 
> In my experience, the best format for dates is the number of seconds since
> the epoch (as is returned by time).  No possible ambiguities, plus  
> functions in Perl to get the desired fields from it (localtime & gmtime).
> Compact too, with no need for structures and references.

If only life was this easy...

The data format is mangled VMS, to the nearest day in EMBL. (No idea what
it is in GenBank). We need to handle, robustly, this sort of accuracy of
dates. We could claim the day is the 1st second at 12am and use unix time
(second since epoch).... it is going to confuse the new users...


I hae a nasty feeling we might roll-our-own date object here. <sigh>.


Other suggestions?

> 
> My CAN$0.02 worth.
> 
> 	-Paul
> 
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Paul Gordon                                     Paul.Gordon@nrc.ca
> Genomic Technologies				http://maggie.cbr.nrc.ca
> Institute for Marine Biosciences
> National Research Council Canada
> 
> 

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