DATES – Age Computation from Birth and Date Headers

Status: Current

Purpose

Reimplements CLAN’s dates command, which computes the age of each participant at the time of transcription by subtracting @Birth dates from the file-level @Date header. Computed ages are inserted as @Comment: Age of CHI is Y;M.D headers after the @ID/@Birth block.

See the CLAN manual for the original command documentation.

The computed age uses CHAT format: years;months.days (e.g., 2;6.15 for two years, six months, and fifteen days).

Usage

chatter clan dates file.cha

Options

This command has no configurable options.

Behavior

1. Collects the @Date header value and all @Birth headers with their participant codes.
2. Computes each participant’s age by subtracting the birth date from the file date.
3. Inserts @Comment: Age of <PARTICIPANT> is <age> headers into the file.
4. If no @Date header is present, the file is left unchanged.

Differences from CLAN

• Operates on AST rather than raw text.
• Uses the framework transform pipeline (parse -> transform -> serialize -> write).