[R] Using POSIX?t rather than "chron" or "date"

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Martin Maechler wrote:

> >>>>> "BDR" == Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>
> >>>>>     on Wed, 17 Sep 2003 06:58:48 +0100 (BST) writes:
> 
>     BDR> On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
>     >> Is the date class standard enough to warrant including a
>     >> check for it in lattice ?
> 
>     BDR> I don't think so.  The POSIX*t classes in R are the
>     BDR> most standard, followed by the chron package and only
>     BDR> then the date package.
> 
> Definitely.  And I think we should encourage people to
> upgrade to POSIX.t from "chron" (let alone "date") more
> strongly {Note that there have been  as.POSIXct() methods for
> these classes since the beginning of the POSIX.t classes.
> 
> Could "chron" and "date" users be heard about what
> functionality they are missing in POSIX.t ?
> 
> On the other hand, the recommended package "survival" has
> a(nother?) class "date" and that package is based on S(plus) code
> and may hence not be convertible sensibly ?

survival has the parts of date it needs included (same class, same
original author).  It has rate tables which as I understand it are in date
format and so need to accessed by date objects.  I could well understand
Thomas not wanting to do a conversion.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595