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

Mark Shannon mark at hotpy.org
Tue Jan 31 23:58:48 CET 2012

Alexander Belopolsky wrote:

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 7:13 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

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 :) FWIW, my vote is also for Decimal and against datetime or timedelta. (I dream of Decimal replacing float in Python 4000, so take my vote with an appropriate amount of salt. :-)

Why not add a new function rather than modifying time.time()? (after all its just a timestamp, does it really need nanosecond precision?)

For those who do want super-accuracy then add a new function time.picotime() (it could be nanotime but why not future proof it :) ) which returns an int represent the number of picoseconds since the epoch. ints never loose precision and never overflow.

Cheers, Mark.

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