[Python-Dev] Store timestamps as decimal.Decimal objects (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue Jan 31 13:13:30 CET 2012

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:11:37 +1000 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Having a low-level module like os needing to know about higher-level types like decimal.Decimal and datetime.datetime (or even timedelta) should be setting off all kinds of warning bells.

Decimal is ideally low-level (it's a number), it's just that it has a complicated high-level implementation :) But we can't use Decimal by default, for the obvious reason (performance impact that threatens to contaminate other parts of the code through operator application).

Of all the possibilties that offer decent arithmetic support, timedelta is probably the one currently most suited to being pushed down to the os level, although decimal.Decimal is also a contender if backed up by Stefan's C implementation.

I'm -1 on using timedelta. This is a purity proposition that will make no sense to the average user. By the way, datetimes are relative too, by the same reasoning.

Regards

Antoine.

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