[Python-Dev] Include datetime.py in stdlib or not? (original) (raw)

Alexander Belopolsky alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com
Wed Jul 7 20:37:33 CEST 2010

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 11:54 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

On 7/6/2010 3:59 PM, Alexander Belopolsky wrote: [.. skipping more general stdlib discussion see "Python equivalents in stdlib" thread ..]

2. There are other areas of stdlib that can benefit more from pure python equivalents. Possibly true, but developers do what they do, and this seems mostly done.

The reason I want to do datetime module is that there are some long-standing bugs/RFEs that would require some experimentation to get it right. Such experimentation is unfeasible in C where more effort goes into thinking about integer overflow and reference counting than into actual design. Here are some of those issues:

http://bugs.python.org/issue5516 = equality not symmetric for subclasses of datetime.date and datetime.datetime http://bugs.python.org/issue2736 = datetime needs an "epoch" method http://bugs.python.org/issue7584 = datetime.rfcformat() for Date and Time on the Internet http://bugs.python.org/issue1100942 = Add datetime.time.strptime and datetime.date.strptime http://bugs.python.org/issue8860 = Rounding in timedelta constructor is inconsistent with that in timedelta arithmetics http://bugs.python.org/issue1647654 = No obvious and correct way to get the time zone offset http://bugs.python.org/issue5288 = tzinfo objects with sub-minute offsets are not supported (e.g. UTC+05:53:28) http://bugs.python.org/issue1982 = Feature: extend strftime to accept milliseconds

3. Reference implementations should be written by a senior CPython developer and not scraped from external projects like PyPy. I did not see that in my reading of the thread. This POV was brought up in the #python-dev IRC channel.

In any case, what matters is quality, not authorship.

I completely agree and I think the sooner the python code gets into the main tree the more reviews it will get before the next release.

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