[threeten-dev] ISO8601 durations and java.time

[Klaus Malorny]

Hi,

recently I took a first look on the new API that comes with Java 8 and 
discovered something that puzzles me, namely, that there does not seem to exist 
a class that can fully represent ISO8601 durations. "Duration" does not 
understand months and years, while "Period" does not understand hours, minutes 
and seconds/fractions. I have read somewhere about a distinction between a 
"human" and a "machine" time line, and for the latter, it may make sense for not 
having months and years, but not for the other for not supporting durations 
below a day.

I consider not having a class representing ISO8601 durations as problematic, as 
these appear here and there in the real world, for example in XML schemas* or in 
databases (e.g. PostgreSQL supports something like). One would have to manage 
this as a pair of Duration and Period, and would need to have a custom parser 
and string conversion. But maybe I simply misunderstand the API. I looked into 
the mailing list archive for the recent months, but I did not find any 
discussion about it, so I just joined the mailing list to ask about.

Regards,

Klaus


* I also cannot see any interaction of the new API with the 
javax.xml.datatype.Duration class