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

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Thu Feb 2 17:56:49 CET 2012

On Feb 02, 2012, at 11:07 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Yup, that's why your middle-ground approach didn't make any sense to me. Returning Decimal when a flag is set to request high precision values actually handles everything (since any epoch related questions only arise later when converting the decimal timestamp to an absolute time value).

Guido really dislikes APIs where a flag changes the return type, and I agree with him. It's because this is highly unreadable:

results = blah.whatever(True)

What the heck does that True do? It can be marginally better with a keyword-only argument, but not much.

I haven't read the whole thread so maybe this is a stupid question, but why can't we add a datetime-compatible higher precision type that hides all the implementation details?

-Barry

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