[Python-Dev] float atime/mtime/ctime - a bad idea? (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Wed, 16 Oct 2002 09:09:13 +0200

Guido van Rossum wrote:

I just found a place in my own code that broke because stat now returns floats for mtime etc. I was using a Zope "OIBTree" object, which is a dict-like extension type mapping strings to ints; it very reasonbly doesn't like it if you assign a float to it.

I'm not say that because my code breaks, this is a bad feature. But I am worried that we'll find more programs using external data types that won't accept floats (I'm thinking of Numpy arrays), and I'm now not so sure if this is acceptable breakage... Apparently the fact that it "works" on the Mac isn't really a great proof. Maybe we can introduce a variant of the stat() function that returns floats, or alternative field names that are only available when using attributes (not when using the tuple-ish API)?

If you're suggesting a new API, why not have it return one of the new datetime objects ?

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