Feature request: Quarter

[matthieugomez]

Could there be a Quarter <: DatePeriod type in Dates?

[StefanKarpinski]

Would that be different from 3 months in any way? My understanding of a quarter is that it's not a duration so much as a fixed splitting of each year. I.e. it's weird to say "a quarter later" if you mean "three months from today"; rather, you refer to the first, second, third and fourth quarters of a given year to refer to a period of time.

[matthieugomez]

Public firms must report earnings every quarter — they do say "next quarter/last quarter".
Defining Quarter makes it easier to work with these accounting datasets (for instance, to compute the growth of earnings between this quarter and next quarter etc...).

Note that not all quarters start in January (Walmart's first quarter is February, March, and April; Apple Inc's Q1 is October, November, and December; Microsoft Corporation's Q1 is July, August, and September).

It is true that a quarter is exactly three months. But then a week is exactly seven days, and we still define Week <: TimePeriod.

[StefanKarpinski]

👍 The PR looks non-trivial enough to make sense.

[matthieugomez]

Solved by #36364