confusing start and end dates for cycles, tasks and ICON

[leclairm]

Problem

Currently, we have the 3 following and confusing date definitions:

• ICON has "start" and "stop" dates in the master namelist to designate the overall simulated time.
• sirocco.core.Cycle potentially has a date entry in the coordinates attribute and start_date and end_date attributes (as opposed to "stop" for ICON) for the overall duration.
• exactly the same for sirocco.core.Task, so date, start_date and end_date attributes, although one would logically expect the last 2 would stand for the start and end of the task itself.

So the current implementation works but is absolutely not natural.

Proposition

Rename end_date as stop_date

On top of providing more coherence in itself, it would also fit with ICON terminology.

Introduce begin_date and end_date for cycles and tasks:

• self.begin_date would simply be a property returning self.coordinates["date"].
• self.end_date would be an attribute inferred at creation time from self.date, the ConfigCycle.period and self.end_date (as maximum cap for the last cycle/task).