[Bug-gnulib] extending getdate.y by calling it differently?

[James Youngman]

Hello,

I'm looking at an idea of supporting absolute date range specification
in findutils which are analogous with the relative times supported by
tests like -atime.  

One way to make this work would be to have a rigidly-defined grammar
for how those timestamps are represented.  However, that feels a lot
like reinventing a wheel.  An alternative would be to make use of
getdate like this:

find / -modifiedafter   "tomorrow 11:32" 
find . -modifiedbetween "January 12 1985 and two hours ago" 

In the second example above I would hope to be able to parse two dates
separated by "and".  To make this possible the ideal thing would be if
get_date() had a variant which would return the number of characters
of the input string consumed, in a way perhaps similar to strtoul().  

Is this practical, or will it be very hard to get get_date() to do
anything other than consume all its input?

Regards,
James.