Date Serials

A floating point number representing a date and time

Description
   A date serial is a number that holds a date and time value in the same 
   format used by PDS or VBDOS. The value is a count of the days from 0:00 
   AM of December 30,1899; it's mainly used for easy counting of the time 
   between two dates.

   The date serial unit is one day and the fractional part represents the 
   time of the day. If a date serial is written into an integer, the time 
   is lost. FreeBASIC date serials are not limited to dates between 1753 
   and 2078 as in VBDOS. FreeBASIC date serial handling functions use Double
   arguments.

   FreeBASIC date serial handling functions require the inclusion of 
   vbcompat.bi or datetime.bi in the source.

   A date serial can be created by the functions Now, TimeSerial+DateSerial
   , or DateValue+TimeValue.

   The functions Year, Month, Weekday, Day, Hour, Minute, Second allow to 
   recover the different components of a date serial.

   The Format function has formatting expressions to print date serials in 
   a human readable way.

Example
   #include "vbcompat.bi"
   Dim a As Double, b As Double

   a = 0
   Print "The origin of the date serials is:"
   Print Format(a, "yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss")
   Print

   a = Now
   Print "The time now is: "
   Print Format(a, "yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss")
   Print

   b = DateSerial(2000,1,1)
   Print Int(a-b) & " days have passed since 2000/01/01"

   
