Make "date" also accept the date(time) data type

[rugk]

Background

I am a total newbie to typst, so just as #32 I am again trying to get a letter for a date "today". I guess, that should be quite a common thing, as the issues also show?

I am using the VSCode/VScodium TinyMist extension.

Same as #36 but here is a related solution, that, IMHO, though could be implemented both.

My aim

I actually found https://typst.app/docs/reference/foundations/datetime/ when searching for a solution to my problem. (actually I did the first try below before but that was just because I could not read docs, I should have been able to find the today() method.

This here would have been my most intuitive/proper solution to solve this:

#show: letter-simple.with(
  // ...
  date: datetime.today(),
  // ...
)

Surprisingly (in a bad way) my extension does not show any red (squiggle) error message, but the compilation shows "red" (which I subsequently learned to interpret as a compiler error, it appears)…

I am still not quite sure how/where I am supposed to find the actual error in this case, but I found this:

INFO  tinymist_project::compiler] ***/main.typ: compilation failed with 2 warnings and errors in 1.4525ms

(Yes even filtering for warn did not turn anything up – I have no idea.)

My first try

I thus tried this then:

#show: letter-simple.with(
  // ...
  date: datetime(2025, 12, 01),
  // ...
)

with a very confusing error message:

unexpected argument - typst

My second try

Given my OOP mind, I tried this, which was not any better:

#show: letter-simple.with(
  // ...
  date: new datetime(2025, 12, 01),
  // ...
)

expected comma - typst

Assumed problem

I guess this because the data type is content | none and datetime is not included there?

Proposal

I mean, what would not make more sense than to allow passing a date (or datetime I am unsure whether time should be allowed, but probably also okay) to a propery named date that is used for displaying a date?
At least optionally?

I mean I agree a string is nice too, but a date and then have it auto-format would be cool, would not it? Yeah, maybe it needs localization then (though this template includes/sets #set text(lang: "de", already, so this seems possible) and a date formatting option possibly (or not), but yeah?

As a new user for this otherwise awesome template, I see this as the only "flaw", currently.