Display Units for Dates

GoldSim provides two special units for displaying dates. These are “datetime” and “date”. If “date” or “datetime” are the assigned display units The units (e.g., m, g, $/day) in which an output is displayed within GoldSim. for an element, the value is displayed as a date (or a date and a time). Note, however, that the value itself must represent a time or be entered directly as a date (e.g., “1/1/2021”).

Note: A date is internally converted and stored as a Julian time (in particular, the time since December 30, 1899 00:00:00). Hence, a date has dimensions An output attribute for an element that defines the dimensionality (in terms of Length, Time and other fundamental dimensions) of the output. of time.

These can be entered as the display units (instead of an actual time unit) for an element. They cannot, however, be combined with other units in unit strings Strings containing only unit abbreviations used to define compound units (e.g., m/sec, lbf/m2). (e.g., to form strings like m3/date).

Note that “date” or “datetime” should not be used to represent a duration or an amount of time. For example, the difference between two dates (“17 October 2009” – “1 October 2009”) represents an amount of time equal to 16 days. If such an expression was assigned units of “date”, it would display a Julian date as shown below (Julian dates are computed from 30 December 1899):

Obviously, this would not be appropriate. By specifying the Display Units as days, the value is displayed as follows: