Today at work I was looking at some older code and saw some DateTime comparisons and thought to myself that there should be really better ways to compare DateTime, Date and Time with each other.
Generally the things I saw the most where the following cases:

• is a before b?
• is a after b?
• is a between b and c?

My initial idea was that the module could use some functions like DateTime.before?(a, b), DateTime.after?(a, b) and DateTime.between?(a, b, c), but quickly realized that it would be pretty easy to confuse the where to put which datetime, so this is probably not much of an option.
Using the pipe operator would help a bit in this regard, but that I think we can do better.
a |> DateTime.before?(b)

I was reading a bit about infix operators but that doesn’t look too promising either for a couple of reasons

• The you’d need to import the infix operators before being able to use them.
• If the list of free available infix operators is still the same, there are no operators I could recommend with this action.

The third way I thought we could use is a mixture from both previously mentioned approaches: DateTime.compare(a, comparator, b)

As for the comparator, I thought something similar to Enum.sort/2 might be a good idea

# simple
DateTime.compare(a, :<, b)
DateTime.compare(a, :<=, b)

# Natural wording?
DateTime.is?(a, :before, b)
DateTime.is?(a, :before_or_same_as, b)

I tried to searching for discussions to this topic on this forum and a little bit on the GitHub repository, but did not find anything recent, so I thought I’d post my thoughts here and maybe get some feedback about this idea. Do you have other approaches that could be considered?