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Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2012 22:50:05 +0100
Message-ID: <CAPg3Xx+YDJQ2buTJN9OBJ6fos+mDdxD9wdWueOZ9+d_qyuP3iA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Derick Rethans <derick@php.net>
Cc: Andrew Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>, Benjamin Eberlei <kontakt@beberlei.de>, Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com>, 
	Will Fitch <wfitch@meetme.com>, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>, 
	"internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC for Adding __toString to DateTime
From: petercowburn@gmail.com (Peter Cowburn)

On 2 September 2012 22:20, Derick Rethans <derick@php.net> wrote:
>
> Yeah, I understand you don't see a reason. That's what scares me. For
> debugging I definetely wouldn't want to have my datetimes mangled to
> just show UTC. I wouldn't even be able to see the difference between 4pm
> London and 5pm Amsterdam time!
>
> cheers,
> Derick
>

Dear Derick et al.,

*If* you are going to pick a default __toString() format, please,
please, please, please, please pick one that a) has *all* of the
information stored in a DateTime object, such that b) I can feed that
string representation back into the constructor and get an identical
DateTime object back.  I have yet to see an example in this thread
that includes microseconds, for example. And the suggestions to have
the GMT offset only is, worrying.

The suggestion to have the string always be returned in UTC is also
(perhaps more so) of concern. I'm all *for* advocating that folks work
with UTC consistently internally in their code, but having the default
string representation use UTC regardless of what the DateTime object
is representing=85 just, wow.

Overall, I'm a big -1 to this whole idea.

Finally, why should "echo $datetime;" be expected to work at all,
since 95% of the time it's only going to be echo'd plain like that for
debugging purposes as we'll never pick the "right" format to use in
everyone's code. When needing to set the "default" (read:
per-instance) string format with something like setToStringFormat() or
whatever, that becomes *more* work than just calling format().

Thank you kindly,
Peter