[ABE.pm] arg isn't numeric?

[Phil R Lawrence]

Ricardo SIGNES wrote:

> * Phil Lawrence <prlawrence at lehigh.edu> [2004-02-11T11:30:36]
>>use Date::Calc qw( :all );
> 
> This is just a bit of evangelism, but: Do look at using DateTime...
> http://datetime.perl.org/

You know, I missed the DateTime talk at YPAC last year, and just never 
looked into it.  Will do!

>>my $begin = shift();
>>my $end   = shift();
>>my $per   = shift();
> 
> 
> Providing defaults would be nice:
>  my $begin = shift || do { print "using default begin"; "2003-01-01" };
> 
> You could do some nice validation here, too.
>  $begin = '2003-01-01' unless $begin =~ /^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$/;
> 
> There's probably a Regex::Common for iso dates.

And, validation would have immediately caught my mistake for me!  It's 
tricky to balance quicky code writing for tests with the danger of 
overengineering and time wasting.

>>print "begin:  ", $begin, "\n";
>>print "end:    ", $end, "\n";
>>print "per:    ", $per, "\n";
>>print "delta:  ", $delta, "\n";
>>print "intrvl: ", $intrvl, "\n";
> 
> 
> Prime candidate for a here-doc.

Hadn't thought of that.  Quite right.  Reminds me of my favorite 
personal idiom, for specifying SQL statements in perl:

     my $sth = $dbh->prepare(<<'');
         SELECT foo
               ,bar
           FROM baz

     $sth->execute(...);

Looks nice with the blank line after the SQL!

Phil