[Python-Dev] PEP: New timestamp formats (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Feb 2 14:43:02 CET 2012

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 11:31 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

Isn't the above (having the return type depend on an argument setting) something we generally try to avoid ?

In Victor's actual patch, the returned object is an instance of the type you pass in, so it actually avoids that issue.

I think it's better to settle on one type for high-res timers and add a new API(s) for it.

We've basically settled on decimal.Decimal now, so yeah, the decision becomes one of spelling - either new APIs that always return Decimal instances, or a way to ask the existing APIs to return Decimal instead of floats.

The way I see it, the latter should be significantly less hassle to maintain (since the code remains almost entirely shared), and it becomes trivial for someone to layer a convenience wrapper over the top that always requests the high precision output.

Cheers, Nick.

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

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