What is Chronos?

Currently, there are versions available for VisualWorks, Squeak and Dolphin--although the Squeak and Dolphin versions lack some of the functionality herein described.

Chronos has been designed and architected for inter-Smalltalk portability. It is intended as a reference/standard implementation of advanced, rich date/time functionality for all Smalltalk flavors.

The current distribution is a beta version--mostly because there will probably be significant API changes in order to more fully support leap seconds.

Chronos Functionality Summary

• Supports business, legal, historical and scientific use cases:
  
  
  • Provides time-of-day-preserving date arithmetic, so that adding days or months doesn't change the time-of-day when crossing a DST transition.
  
  
  • Provides full support for both scientific (scale-invariant) and civil (calendar/business/legal) durations.
  
  
  • Supports point-in-time values that are either invariant to Universal Time (as required by the ANSI Standard) or invariant to nominal time. UT-invariant point-in-time values compare as equal to all others whose designation in Universal Time is the same--regardless of their time zone or designation in local time. Nominal-time-invariant point-in-time values compare as equal to all others with the same local ("nominal") time, regardless of time zone or designation in Universal Time--so a single instance can correctly specify the first moment of New Year's Day (of a particular year) in any time zone. (Example of a problem solvable by means of nominal-time invariance.)
  
  
  • Provides for the definition/detection of annually-recurring events (e.g., holidays, anniversaries, legal deadlines, number of trading days on the NYSE between two dates...)
  
  
  • Provides resolution down to the nanosecond.


• Provides comprehensive time zone functionality:
  
  
  • Fully supports the world-wide time zone rulesets defined by the Olson Timezone Database (the native time zone database of UNIX/MacOS X.)
  
  
  • Supports diachronic time zone rules that can change from one year to the next (For example, although you might know that Hawaii's current time zone offset is -10 hours, what you might not know is that on Dec 7, 1941 Hawaii's time zone offset was -10:30 hours. Chronos, however, knows this.)
  
  
  • Can automatically discover the local time zone from the Windows Registry or from the TZ "Environment Variable" (UNIX/MacOS X or Windows.)
  
  
  • Enables updating time zone rules without changing your application code (NOTE: US Daylight Saving Time extended by 4 weeks)


• Supports various calendrical systems in addition to the international standard Gregorian calendar (e.g., Julian, Hebrew, Islamic, Persian...).


• Provides very flexible formatting of date/time values, including extensible support for multiple locales, and "built in" support for ISO 8601 and RFC 2822 formats.


• Provides very flexible parsing of dates, times and date-and-time values from character data--including full support for ISO 8601, RFC 2822, time zone names, time zone abbreviations and time zone offsets.


• Provides high performance--usually significantly faster than the competition.

To learn more, or to download the code, select one of the topics from the list on the left-hand side of the page.

[Chronos] All code (classes and methods, and all associated documentation,) distributed as part of the Chronos Date/Time library are © Copyright 2005-2006 by Alan L. Lovejoy.  All Rights Reserved. Usage is controlled by the Chronos License (which is included in the distribution as the contents of the file {chronos-license.txt}, and is also available from the Chronos web site {http://www.chronos-st.org/License.html})

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at the close of the day;
Rage, rage at the dying of the light!" -- Dylan Thomas