Re: Teach "approxidate" about weekday syntax

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

It is not English but Gittish, which is fine, but it somehow
reminds me of the funny way users make themselves understood by
IF parsers ;-).  I am afraid you started small but now are going
towards the same insanity of gnudate (it has insane yacc grammar
to grok these things), and I suspect we'd better draw a line
somewhere.

I think I'm done.

The multi-week "3 sundays ago" part came for free, but the "last sunday" 
was actually something I liked.

Seriously, I can't imagine what else we'd want. It parses exact dates 
(thanks to the old date-parsing code), and it now parses all the normal 
"lazy dates" I can think of.

The fact that you can combine "last saturday" with "three days ago" is 
really not a feature as much as a result of the algorithm being so simple 
that it just doesn't care, and the combination just happens to work.

My examples were a bit silly as a result. In real life, you'd probably 
never use any combinations, but simply use

	"December 5th"
	"last sunday"
	"yesterday"
	"two days ago"
	"12 hours ago"

and the fact that then some (but definitely not all) combinations of the 
above all work is really just an accident and not something that people 
should necessarily even depend on.

quoted

Side note 2: if you want to avoid spaces (because of quoting issues), you 
can use any non-alphanumberic character instead. So

	git log --since=2.days.ago

works without any quotes.

I think this is a useful change.  Thanks.

That's actually not a new change, the approxidate thing always worked that 
way, but I thought I'd point it out.

		Linus