Support for partial Date

Hi,

Please add a type that enables nullable portions of date, for example, we should be able to set ‘month’ and ‘day’, while leaving ‘year’ null (e.g. Anniversary: 21 May), or set only ‘year’ (e.g. Born 1912), or ‘year’ and ‘month’ only (Died in May 1972) while the rest is null.

I always bump in the need for this when dealing with genealogical data, or optional date data (e.g. birth or death date), where we have to give the user to choice of what data is available to them.

You might want to consider partial-time, and partial-date, then partial date-time that comprises of the two.

Once there, it’d be beneficial to have ranges too: DateRange(PartialDate rangeStart, PartialDate rangeEnd).

Related SO question.

[bytenik]

I wrote the original StackOverflow question. And while in the last 6 years I’ve trended more towards TypeScript development than C#, every time I work in C# I end up using Noda Time, and every time I end up working with Noda Time I end up bumping into this same issue. I think the main functionality beyond the storage type itself would be comparisons with a concrete Instant. Things like YearMonth and AnnualDate help, but, sometimes both a fully specified time or part of one are both permissible. An example is birthday; perhaps I want to store a user’s full birthday, but for some people I only have birth month and year. Regardless, I want certain logic to happen during a user’s birth month.

[jskeet]

Closing for now, as I don’t expect to do anything on this - I’m not convinced there’s a sufficiently general set of operations we’d want to expose.