[Python-Dev] dateutil (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Mar 15 18:17:47 EST 2004

Kevin Jacobs <jacobs at theopalgroup.com>:

After using such a system in a large system with non-trivial date manipulations, I think you'd change your mind about that approach -- it can be excessively verbose.

Maybe, but I'm skeptical of that. The less trivial the operations are, the more I'm likely to want to see spelled out clearly what is being done and what order it's being done in.

I'm usually quite willing to accept some verbosity if it contributes clarity. Whenever I try to come up with some clever coding scheme to reduce verboseness, I usually end up regretting it, because clarity suffers and when I came back to the code later I have a hard time figuring out what's going on. Usually I end up rewriting it verbosely all over again so that I understand it.

Someday I may learn my lesson and just leave it verbose in the first place...

However, in my datetime classes, I also have a very complete set of calls like: startOfMonth, endOfMonth, startOfYear, endOfYear, lastWeekday, nextWeekday, etc...

That's good. Having two completely different ways of expressing the same thing seems like Too Many Ways To Do It, though, especially if this stuff is to be included in the standard library.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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