Additional formatting syntax

[chronotope]

Additional formatting syntax

[eugenesvk]

The current format method is directly based on strftime. While this is not that bad

Oh, those % are just awful visual pollution in %d.%m.%y vs a simple d.m.y :(

• std::fmt-inspired syntax. {YYYY}-{MM}-{DD} {hh}:{mm}:{ss.sss} {+xx:xx}? Not sure about the specifier.

That's another ugliness where 'metadata' take as much space as the data! Could these {} and % be reserved only for resolving ambiguity, passing some extra parameters or something, not as the defaults even when they're not needed, i.e. for most of the cases?

• Go's "format-by-example" syntax (http://golang.org/pkg/time/#pkg-constants). Cons: It doesn't fully cover the use case of strftime. Possibly we can go with an additional method named format_like.

That's an excellent starting point (as long as the "regrettable historic error" is fixed :))!

[djc]

FWIW, I'm unlikely to prioritize this until maybe after 0.5 is released. But if someone wanted to prepare a design that can cover all of the current use cases with a better syntax, I'd be happy to review that.

[esheppa]

One further thing to note here for anyone wanting to do some experimentation, any new syntax only needs to be compatible with the existing chrono::format::Item, in which case being able to parse a &str into an iterator or sequence of these Items is sufficient to use the rest of the formatting infrastructure