[Python-Dev] Proposing an alternative to PEP 410 (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Sun Feb 26 15:04:45 CET 2012

Scratch that, I don't agree. timedelta is a pretty clumsy type to use. Have you ever tried to compute the number of seconds between two datetimes? You can't just use the .seconds field, you have to combine the .days and .seconds fields. And negative timedeltas are even harder due to the requirement that seconds and microseconds are never negative; e.g -1 second is represented as -1 days plus 86399 seconds.

Guido, you should switch to Python3! timedelta has a new total_seconds() method since Python 3.2. http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/datetime.html#datetime.timedelta.total_seconds

datetime.timedelta(1).totalseconds() 86400.0 datetime.timedelta(seconds=-1).totalseconds() -1.0

Victor

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