[GemStone-Smalltalk] DateAndTime users' questionnaire

[Martin McClure]

If you use DateAndTime in your GemStone application, we at GemTalk would 
very much appreciate your feedback on the questions below.

At customer request, we're working on a SmallDateAndTime class for 
GemStone -- a "Special" (immediate) version of DateAndTime that relates 
to DateAndTime similarly to the relationship between SmallInteger and 
LargeInteger. For customers with many persistent DateAndTime instances, 
this should improve both space and time performance.

There are design tradeoffs in resolution, range, printing, etc., and it 
will help us make better decisions if we know how DateAndTime is being 
used now.

(1) Which of the following messages do you use to create DateAndTime 
instances?
  * DateAndTime now
  * DateAndTime nowWithScale:
  * DateAndTime fromString:
  * DateAndTime year:day:hour* or year:month:day:hour*
  * Other protocol

(2) Do you need DateAndTimes with resolution finer than a microsecond?

(3) What is your year range of DateAndTime; do you need or use 
DateAndTimes more than 5/10/50 years into the future (or the past)?

(4) How do you handle DateAndTime printing?

(5) Have you created a subclass of DateAndTime or DateAndTimeANSI, or 
added your own methods to DateAndTime or DateAndTimeANSI?  If this is 
general functionality that could be useful to include in the base, 
please let us know.

(6) DateAndTime instances would need to be immutable, to be 
interoperable with SmallDateAndTime. If you are using methods that do 
update a DateAndTime, such as offset: or beRounded, does your code 
expect the receiver to be modified?