achrist@easystreet.com wrote:
> I further think that this is commonly understood by the world at
> largeMy Webster's dictionary says the p.m. means "after noon." Noon is not
after noon. There are neither any other definitions nor any
loopholes offered by my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 7th ed.P.m. is an abbreviation for "post meridian". The sun is not
"post meridian" when it's on the meridian.
Ok, I don't mean to quibble, but I'm arguing for *convention* here,
rather than theoretical correctness. I concede that 12:00:00 PM
may not be scientifically meaningful according to the strict definition
of "PM." However, 12:00:01 PM DOES make sense, as does
12:00:00:00:01 AM. I think most reasonable people know what
time you're talking about when you say 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM, and
I personally think that requiring a special construction of the
control for these two instants in time is just not worth it.
I was citing the windows example (among others) as "convention,"
since the majority of the world's computers run it, and therefore
the majority of the world's computer users see it and are expected
to know to what times these 2 representations refer. I wanted the
control to mirror other conventional time controls and be intuitively
understood. I also am a big fan of brevity in typing and
consistency of format, particularly if the values are unambiguous.
So I personally do not plan to address this concern in my code.
I'm doing educational software, and I must not be a bad example
to the students. I'm afraid that 24 hour time might not be
comfortable for them.
If you're that worried about these 2 seconds of the day, then if I
were you, I would insist on 24 hour time for its precison and complete
unambiguity. (It's also used almost exclusively in the rest of the
world.)
However -- the control is written entirely in Python!
If you choose, you can derive your own time control from
wxMaskedTextCtrl, using wxTimeCtrl as a model. There's nothing
particularly special about the time formats I'm using, although
there's a bunch of time text validation logic in wxMaskedEditMixin
you might have to mimic on your own, and you'd have to work a
bit to disallow illegal strings if you allow "midnight" and
"noon" in the last field(s?), and your control will look pretty darn
ugly if it has to always be big enough to hold "midnight" and I
don't know if either wxDateTime or mxDateTime know how to parse
"12:00 midnight" or "12:00 noon"... But, hey-- it's your time
(pun intended)... knock yourself out! 
Regards,
/Will Sadkin
Parlance Corporation
www.nameconnector.com