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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Feb 15 18:13:13 CET 2012

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 8:47 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:39:45 -0800 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

What purpose is there to recording timestamps in nanoseconds? For clocks that start when the process starts running, float is (basically) good enough. For measuring e.g. file access times, there is no way that the actual time is know with anything like that precision (even if it is recorded as a number of milliseconds -- that's a different issue). The number one use case, as far as I understand, is to have bit-identical file modification timestamps where it can matter.

So that can be solved by adding extra fields st_{a,c,m}time_ns and an extra os.utime_ns() call. Only the rare tool for making 100% faithful backups of filesystems and the like would care.

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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