The Nīsān release introduces full support for ANSI-Standard Dates and Times into Essence#. It also fixes some important bugs.
Nīsān is the name of the first month of the eccelesiastical Hebrew Calendar (the name of the first month of the secular Hebrew Calendar is Tishri.) [We’re still using a Biblical naming scheme, because we’re still in alpha. However, we’re (hopefully) only 2-3 releases away from going to beta, which will happen after we achieve full compliance with the ANSI Standard.]
In addition to what’s required by the ANSI Standard with respect to times, dates and durations of time, convenience methods were added to class Number that enable the creation of Durations by sending messages such as #days, #hours, #minutes, #seconds, #milliseconds and #microseconds to numbers.
As you may or may not be aware, I’m not only the author Essence#, I’m also the author of the Chronos Date/Time Library. In spite of that, I’ve added very little time/date functionality in this release that wasn’t either required by the ANSI Standard or provided by the relevant classes and methods in the .Net Base Class Library.
About 80% of the users of a programming language just don’t need anything more in the way of time/date support beyond what is required by the ANSI Standard. And those who do only need it about 20% of the time. So it doesn’t make good sense to include anything like the Chronos Date/Time Library in the “standard library” for any programming language: It’s overkill for most people, most of the time.
But it does make sense to include the Chronos Date/Time Library as an extension library. But the time for that is not yet.
Download Nīsān (Alpha Build 22)
To download the latest release, navigate to the DOWNLOADS page on CodePlex. There’s a download link in the upper left corner of the DOWNLOADS page, labeled Essence#_Nisan_Setup.exe. Using it will get you a program that will install the Nīsān release of Essence# to any location you choose on your computer. Please see the documentation page on the CodePlex site for more information on how to use Essence#, such as the installation instructions and instructions on how to run scripts written in Essence#.
The Nīsān release includes changes and additions to the Essence# Standard Library–which will be installed by the installer program attached to this release, or which may be obtained separately from GitHub.
One of the utility scripts that aid in developing Essence# code was changed in this release, and a bug in one of the example scripts was fixed. Other that that, there were no other changes to any of of the scripts, and no new scripts were added. For more information on the scripts, please see the documentation.
Essence# 