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Re: what happened to time/date functions?

Mirko Vukovic <mvukovic@taz.telusa.com> writes:

> In article <MPG.14198bc9d020ee9989c19@news.frii.com>,
>   davidf@dfanning.com (David Fanning) wrote:
> > Mirko Vukovic (mvukovic@taz.telusa.com) writes:
> >
> > > I'm runing idl 5.3.1 on windows nt, and cannot access
> > > the time and date functions introduced in 5.1.
> > >
> > > Am I on the correct planet, or have I missed something?.
> >
> > No, Mirko, you've been in a time warp. Those things
> > disappeared in IDL 5.2. Not Y2K compatible, I guess. :-)
> >
> > Check out the Label_Date function. And there are some
> > neat new things in IDL 5.4 (a TimeGen function, for
> > example). I think most everyone though is using the
> > date/time functions available on either the Johns
> > Hopkins Applied Physics Lab or NASA Astronomy ftp
> > sites.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> hm, I saw nothing in the list of obsolete routines.
> Thanks for the pointer to the other libraries.  As for
> 5.4, well, some of us are mere mortals :-)
> 
> have a good weekend
> 
> Mirko
> 

  They weren't really 'obsoleted' since the functionality wasn't
  replaced, just removed. If you skipped from 5.1 to 5.3, as I did,
  these routines just *disappeared*. 

  I think this whole thing was handled pretty badly. Apparently few
  share my concern since most everyone else seems to be using the
  JHAPL routines and so the loss of this functionality is a 'eh... so
  what?' sort of thing for them. But it does demonstrate that RSI will
  remove whole blocks of functionality without much warning.

  On the plus side, I can't think of another such 'block of
  functionality' which might share characteristics making it liable to
  a similar fate as these routines, so I imagine we won't see such
  wholesale decimation of the code base again.

  If you want these routines back, see my other message in this
  thread. I use these routines all the time with no problem. Just
  don't use 2 digit years and you'll be fine.

William
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