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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Feb 2 21:48:44 CET 2012

On Feb 3, 2012 2:59 AM, "Barry Warsaw" <barry at python.org> wrote:

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.

Victor's patch passes in the return type rather than a binary flag, thus avoiding this particular problem.

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

It's not a stupid question, but for backwards compatibility, what we would actually need is a version of Decimal that implicitly interoperates with binary floats. That's... not trivial.

Cheers, Nick

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