In a new post to the Web Tech blog over on SitePoint, Toby Somerville has posted something he calls "RoughTime" - his method for displaying a more "human friendly" output of a timestamp.

When asked the time, we generally don't need to be military accurate with our response [...] we generally communicate the approximate time. i.e. 'its nearly ten' or 'its just gone half past three'. Yet on the web, time is generally shown as '12:24:13 AM', or similar â€" not very visitor friendly.

His RoughTime uses two switch statements to map the hour and minute values to different strings. For example, minutes between 15 and 20 become "quarter past" and the hours are changed over from numeric versions to their word counterparts.

Rob Thompson has posted about some simple benchmarking he did comparing the speed of a series of "if" statements versus one "switch" with multiple cases.

I got curious about which is actually more efficient at matching a random integer with a set of conditionals. So, I setup a script to create a set of large scripts to test the speed of these different constructs. Using the 'time' command, I measured the speed at which the condition could match a random number.

His results found that the switch statement is generally more than 2 times as fast at matching a simple integer. His tests, however, didn't go through much more than this simple test. It'd be interesting to see what it would do with something more complex (like longer strings or handling the result of an evaluation inside the definition of the switch().