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

[Paul Gordon]

> > >   (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.
> 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...

Date rounding shouldn't be too confusing...
I think new users are likely to be familiar with the time and localtime
commands, or at least have them in the camel book.  If a new date class is
created, users will have to depend on the perldocs for that new class,
which may be a little harded.  If the plan is to go the object route,
at least there are good ones around that could probably be reused, such as
DateTime::Precise which has some nice parsing.