Standard collection of interpolators?

Scala and Java both have lots of types that are initialised from a string, where an illegal string will compile but fail at runtime. It’d be great if Contextual could provide standard modules for such types.

I’ve often felt the need for such a tool for:

• joda’s DateTimeFormatter
• java8’s DateTimeFormatter
• java.net.URL
• java.net.URI

I’m sure there are a lot commonly used types out there that would benefit from a literal syntax.

Happy to lend a hand or even write most of these, but if you feel this is a good idea, the structure needs to come from you - do you want that to be a completely separate library that depends on Contextual? Standard Contextual modules that live in this repository?

[propensive]

It might be worthwhile having Contextual provide just the data representations of these things, with no interesting methods implemented, and have the actual interesting stuff (e.g. an HTTP POST method on a URL) provided as extension methods in other libraries.

[fommil]

out-of-the-box parser for stdlib data types would be awesome! Support for Instant would be 💯

I will probably put one together, you’re welcome to it, but I’m sure you’re aware how trivial it is.