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

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Wed Feb 15 02:13:58 CET 2012

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 5:13 PM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 8:29 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

My primary concern with the PEP is adding to users confusion when they have to handle (at least) 5 different types[*] that represent time in Python.

My key question to those advocating the use of timedelta instead of Decimal: What should timedelta.totalseconds() return to avoid losing nanosecond precision? How should this be requested when calling the API? It should return a float as it does today.  Add a timedelta.totalnanoseconds() call for people wanting high precision as a raw number and remind people of the precision limits of totalseconds() in the docs.

total_nanoseconds() would return an int() in case that wasn't obvious.

-gps

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