[Python-Dev] Issue 2736: datetimes and Unix timestamps (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Jun 4 14:11:04 CEST 2012

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 9:19 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan at ochtman.nl> wrote:

Anyway, I was pointed to issue 2736, which seems to have got a lot of discouraged core contributors (Victor, Antoine, David and Ka-Ping, to name just a few) up against Alexander (the datetime maintainer, AFAIK). It seems like a fairly straightforward case of practicality over purity: Alexander argues that there are "easy" one-liners to do things like datetime.totimestamp(), but most other people seem to not find them so easy. They've since been added to the documentation at least, but I would like to see if there is consensus on python-dev that adding a little more timestamp support to datetime objects would make sense.

I hope this won't become another epic issue like the last time-related issue...

My perspective is that if I'm dealing with strictly absolute time, I should only need one import: datetime

If I'm dealing strictly with relative time, I should also only need one import: time

I shouldn't need to import any other modules to convert betwen them and, since datetime is the higher level of the two, that's where the responsibility for handling any conversions should lie.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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