[Python-Dev] PEP 410 (Decimal timestamp): the implementation is ready for a review (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Tue Feb 14 22:58:24 CET 2012

2012/2/14 Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org>:

On Feb 13, 2012, at 07:33 PM, Victor Stinner wrote:

Oh, I forgot to mention my main concern about datetime: many functions returning timestamp have an undefined starting point (an no timezone information ), and so cannot be converted to datetime: - time.clock(), time.wallclock(), time.monotonic(), time.clockgettime() (except for CLOCKREALTIME) - time.clockgetres() - signal.get/setitimer() - os.wait3(), os.wait4(), resource.getrusage() - etc. That's not strictly true though, is it?  E.g. clockgettime() returns the number of seconds since the Epoch, which is a well-defined start time at least on *nix systems.

I mentionned the exception: time.clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME) returns an Epoch timestamp, but all other clocks supported by clock_gettime() has an unspecified starting point:

 So clearly those types of functions could return datetimes.

What? What would be the starting point for all these functions? It would be surprising to get a datetime for CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID for example.

I'm fairly certain that between those types of functions and timedeltas you could have most of the bases covered.

Ah, timedelta case is different. But I already replied to Nick in this thread about timedelta. You can also

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list