[Remind-Fans] New stuff in master (was Re: Repeat every six months)

[Ian! D. Allen]

This clever solution is why we pay you the big bucks:

On Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 03:51:56PM -0500, Dianne Skoll via Remind-fans wrote:
> But I'm making changes (which you can
> preview at git master) that add a "trig" function.  So
> for the every-six-months case, you can write:
> 
>    REM [trig("1 --1 April", "1 --1 October")] MSG Last day of March/Sep
>    REM [trig("Mon June", "Mon July")] MSG Mondays in June and July
>    REM [trig("Jan", "Feb", "Mar")] MSG Every day in January through March
>    REM [trig("Jan", "Mar") && trig("1", "5", "15")] MSG 1st, 5th, 15th of Jan and Mar
> 
> Basically: trig() takes any number of arguments.  It evaluates each of
> them as a trigger, and returns the trigger date of the *first* one that
> would trigger today.  If none of them would trigger today, returns the
> zero-day of the epoch, which is 1990-01-01.

The above function improves readability and reduces duplication.  Woo hoo!

Now, how hard would it be to add syntactic sugar so that a syntax like
the one below might translate to the above trig() calls?

   REM 1 --1 April OR 1 --1 October MSG Last day of March/Sep
   REM Mon June OR Mon July MSG Mondays in June and July
   REM Jan OR Feb OR Mar MSG Every day in January through March
   REM ( Jan OR Mar ) AND ( 1 OR 5 OR 15 ) MSG 1st, 5th, 15th of Jan and Mar

Also, how about adding "LASTDAY March" as syntactic sugar for "1 --1 April"?
It's maddening that something as simple as "last day of month" has to
specify the name of the *following* month.

-- 
| Ian! D. Allen, BA-Psych, MMath-CompSci  idallen at idallen.ca Ottawa CANADA
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