putting date strings in order

[noydb]

On May 11, 11:30 pm, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> noydb <jenn.du... at gmail.com> writes:
> > Anyone have any good ideas?  I was curious to see what people came up
> > with.
>
> Is this a homework assignment?  Some hints:
>
> 1) figure out how to compare two month names for chronological order,
>    leaving out the issue of the starting month not being january.
> 2) figure out how to adjust for the starting month.  The exact
>    semantics of the "%" operator might help do this concisely.

Ha!  No, this is not a homework assignment.  I just find myself to be
not the most eloquent and efficient scripter and wanted to see how
others would approach it.

I'm not sure how I follow your suggestion.  I have not worked with the
%.  Can you provide a snippet of your idea in code form?

I thought about assigning a number string (like 'x_1') to any string
containing 'jan' -- so x_jan would become x_1, and so on.  Then I
could loop through with a counter on the position of the number (which
is something i will need to do, comparing one month to the next
chronological month, then that next month to its next month, and so
on).  And as for the starting postion, the user could declare, ie, aug
the start month.  aug is position 8.  therefore subtract 7 from each
value, thus aug becomes 1.... but then I guess early months would have
to be add 5, such that july would become 12.  Ugh, seems sloppy to me.

Something like that....   seems poor to me.  Anybody have a bteer
idea, existing code???