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On Feb 3, 2012 2:59 AM, "Barry Warsaw" <barry@python.org> wrote:
>
> On Feb 02, 2012, at 11:07 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>
> >Yup, that's why your middle-ground approach didn't make any sense to
> >me. Returning Decimal when a flag is set to request high precision
> >values actually handles everything (since any epoch related questions
> >only arise later when converting the decimal timestamp to an absolute
> >time value).
>
> Guido really dislikes APIs where a flag changes the return type, and I agree
> with him. �It's because this is highly unreadable:
>
> � �results = blah.whatever(True)
>
> What the heck does that \`True\` do? �It can be marginally better with a
> keyword-only argument, but not much.

Victor's patch passes in the return type rather than a binary flag, thus avoiding this particular problem.

> I haven't read the whole thread so maybe this is a stupid question, but why
> can't we add a datetime-compatible higher precision type that hides all the
> implementation details?
>
> -Barry

It's not a stupid question, but for backwards compatibility, what we would actually need is a version of Decimal that implicitly interoperates with binary floats. That's... not trivial.

Cheers,
Nick
\--
Sent from my phone, thus the relative brevity :)