playing with NOW

[leke]

I checked out Ruby at the weekend and was having a go at some tutorials.
There was an 'numbers excercise' part...

how many seconds old are you?
how many minutes are in a decade?

...which I had a go at in REBOL because I wanted to account for leap years. I thought the NOW function would be really handy for this type of job so I coded 'how many seconds old are you?'.

Code:

REBOL[]
days_old: now - 23-Nov-1975
seconds_old: days_old * 86400
print ["You are" seconds_old "seconds old on this DAY."]

nt: now/time
hour: nt/hour
mins: nt/minute
sec: nt/second
get_seconds: (hour * 3600) + (mins * 60) + sec

exactly: seconds_old + get_seconds

print ["You were" exactly "seconds old when this program was executed!"]
halt

Which worked ok (I think).
But then I tried 'how many minutes are in a decade?' and got stuck.
I was going to work it like...

todays date minus todays date 10 years ago

...which gets my decade with any leap year irregularities thrown in.
I had a lot of problems with this. I could subtract 10 years from now/year, but then couldn't get it back on a whole date value.
I suppose I was then going to get the days between them and convert days-to-minutes.

Any ideas?

[Gabriele]

Code:

>> date-of-birth: 23-Nov-1975
== 23-Nov-1975
>> difference now date-of-birth
== 252370:51:02
>> to integer! difference now date-of-birth
== 908535111

>> date: now
== 6-Sep-2004/12:52:53+2:00
>> ten-years-ago: date
== 6-Sep-2004/12:52:53+2:00
>> ten-years-ago/year: 1994
== 1994
>> ten-years-ago
== 6-Sep-1994/12:52:53+2:00
>> time: difference date ten-years-ago
== 87672:00
>> time/hour * 60
== 5260320

[leke]

>> date-of-birth: 23-Nov-1975
== 23-Nov-1975
>> difference now date-of-birth
** Script Error: difference expected set1 argument of type: series bitset
** Near: difference now date-of-birth
>>

How come this goes wrong in my console and not yours?

I'm using:
REBOL/View 1.2.1.3.1 21-Jun-2001

[Gabriele]

1.2.1 is a bit too old. :-)

You should try at least 1.2.8, but I'd suggest one of the latest betas. (i.e. 1.2.47)

[leke]

Will do.
Thanks.  

[Guest]

1.2.1 may be "old"
But it is the current live release:
http://www.rebol.com/view-platforms.html

It would help if those posting code here clearly marked it as "Does not work on current live release -- needs xxx"

That way, those of us who are trying to get _systems_ that are based on stable releases to work. will know to look elsewhere.

[Gabriele]

The only reason 1.2.1 is still the "official" release is the number of platforms. Apparently, noone seems interested in most of the platforms originally supported by View. This means, that the latest betas, even if MORE STABLE that the official 1.2.1 (a huge number of bugs have been fixed, and I think there's only a small part of the REBOL community still using 1.2.1), don't get the "official" status because they have only been tested and made available on a small number of platforms.

To counter this problem. RT has announced that for View 1.3 a number of platforms will be dropped.

Anyway, if you're really interested in stable systems, I'd suggest you checking one of the latest versions if your platforms are supported. You wont regret it.