'calend' facility

[Bruce Israel]

I know that discussion shouldn't be here, but the message that I am
following up to was here in net.sources.

	From: mikem at tekcae.UUCP (Michael E. Meyer)

	We have installed 'calend' here and find it extremely useful.
	However, there is one thing that would make it very compete and
	that would be a calendar that would print with appointments ...

As the author of 'calend', I agree with you.  Recently someone posted
a calendar printing program called 'calen' (not to be confused with my
program 'calend') and I've sort of been toying with the idea of
modifying that program to print out messages from a .calrc file in the
whitespace within the blocks.  However, its not a simple task (for
example, consider the line "a+  September 21  *   +14 Payday today!!!!"
which prints out bi-weekly payday messages every other friday.  A 1985
calendar should have 26 messages of this form).  I may do it someday,
but lately I've been kind of busy and this is a low priority.

Another idea I've been thinking about lately is allowing specifications
of dates like "the second tuesday of every month" to be specified
as an intersection of the dates "tuesday" and the dates 8-14 of every
month (the second week of the month), specified somewhat
like "<tue, {jan - dec} {8 - 14}>".  I haven't fully decided because I
feel that this is powerful, but not extremely readable, and those are
two qualities I've been striving for in the date specification language.

Any furthur discussion should probably be either via mail or in
net.cog-eng if it more generally discusses issues like this.
-- 

Bruce Israel

University of Maryland, Computer Science
{rlgvax,seismo}!umcp-cs!israel (Usenet)    israel at Maryland (Arpanet)