1. What's the right way to handle the duration of events (such as "Lent" or "high tea")?

Might I suggest that as well as producing a "struct tm," the conversion routine also provide some extra information about the date/time parsed. This could include: - indications of which fields were explicitly given -v- those that assumed default values (e.g. "14:30" results in the next [or previous] 14:30 with all fields except hours and minutes marked implicit), - relative times [+ and -] to indicate durations (e.g., those strings above, or "1:30+-5", "18:30+1:00", or "tommorrow at noon for two hours") [kind of like DCE/DTS's idea of inaccuracy, but assymetric], - some indication of repetition (e.g., "every third Wednesday" or "every July 4th"). Brad