Hugo Kornelis (5/24/2010)
The reason I cheated is that the expressions used to set the two datetime variables are way too complex to understand. Especially with their (lack of) formatting. Having to scroll horizontally to see the end of an expression is never a good sign. Same goes for having to count parenthese to find out what belongs together and what doesn't. If one of my staff (which in reality I don't have) turned in this code, I'd send him/her back.
I don't count using the system to simplify complex expressions for you as cheating, in fact if the expressions are complex enough I count not doing so as stupidity.
But I'm a bit surprised you found these ones complex. Yes, it's irritating to have to scroll horizontally, and to see the bracket matches so that you know what goes with what, and it'd bad coding not to lay it out cleanly so that the structure of each expression is obvious, but it doesn't really take much time to notice that the only differences in the two long expressions are substitution or 0 for 30 in the minutes and 10 for 12 in the hours, and that the bracketing is particularly simple, so that the differences is 1H30M (this took me less than a minute - possibly because last year I looked at a lot of code that does lots of bulk precalculation of aggregates and percentiles for various periods and it was riddled with start-time and end-time expressions much like these ones, but I can't see it taking me more than 2 mins even if I hadn't had that experience).
Tom