Anyone got a date math routine?

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 12:13:04PM -0500, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> Quoting Jay R. Ashworth (Wed, 5 Dec 2007 10:17:33 -0500):
> >On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 09:32:45AM -0500, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> [...]
> >>There is no "round function" because none is needed.  It's done for you
> >>automatically.  For example, put "1.666" into a .2 field and you get 
> >>"1.67".
> >>Store "125"/"100" into a .0 field and you get "1".
> >
> >This *seems* like a Really Neat Idea... but in my case here, what it
> >means is that I need to know the length of the integer part of the
> >result of dividing by 57 million *before I declare the length of the
> >target field*.
> >
> >I'm not sure I can do that.
> 
> I'm not sure what problem you are envisioning.  Can you give a specific
> example of what problem you see?

You are suggesting that the way to round the results of my dividing
(frex) 123,594 seconds by the 86,400 seconds in a day, to find out that
it's 1.43 days, which I'll round to 1 day, is by assigning the results
of that division to a 1,.0 field, since 1.43 assigned to that field
will result in 1, and 1.52 would result in 2.

Assuming I've understood you correctly, the question is:

What happens when what I am dividing by 86,400 is 935,292?

The result of that is 10.825138_

10 days is a valid answer.  (Though it *might* get clipped earlier, to
weeks, it might not)

But I can't round it in a 1,.0 field.

Using numeric fields to do rounding requires you to count from the left
side of *the entire number*, and worse, to do it at compile time.  When
I need to round, I need to do it *from the decimal point rightward*.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
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