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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

What's the issue with having a span represent "one year and two months"? Both involve a variable number of days (365-366 and 28-31), but I would hope you could store the components separately so it can be unambiguously applied once given a specific moment in time.

I'm thinking something along the lines of how ActiveSupport::Duration works:

    >> 4.years + 5.months + 3.weeks + 2.days + 1.hour + 4.minutes + 10.seconds
    => 4 years, 5 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 10 seconds

Of course the downside being that it would need to be sized large enough to contain each component, even though they may be rarely used.

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The components are stored separately. I think what you are advocating for is component wise addition, which I mentioned in my previous comment. It can totally "work," but as I said, it will produce different results than `span1.checked_add(span2)`. For example:

    use jiff::{ToSpan, Unit, Zoned};

    fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
        let span1 = 1.year().months(3);
        let span2 = 11.months();
        let now = Zoned::now().round(Unit::Minute)?;
        let added = span1.checked_add((span2, &now))?;
        println!("{added}");

        Ok(())
    }

Has this output:

    $ cargo -q r
    P2y2m

Notice how the months overflow automatically into years. Days will do the same into months. You need a reference point to do this correctly. For example, just `span1.checked_add(span2)?` would produce an error.

In contrast, component wise addition would lead to a span of `1 year 14 months`. Which is a valid `Span`. Jiff is fine with it. But it's different than what `checked_add` does. Having both operations seems too subtle.

Also, I don't really think using the `+` operator just to construct spans is that much of a win over what Jiff already has. So that needs to be taken into account as well.

The Into<SpanArithmetic> argument feels a little too magical. Since you are not constrained by a trait, I would prefer something like

    Span::add_with_reference(&self, other: &Span, reference: impl Into<SpanRelativeTo>)

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