[Python-Dev] datetime nanosecond support (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Jul 25 16:38:52 CEST 2012

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 7:11 AM, Christian Heimes <lists at cheimes.de> wrote:

Am 25.07.2012 14:11, schrieb Nick Coghlan:

1. For the reasons presented, I think it's worth attempting to define a common API that is based on datetime, but is tailored towards high precision time operations (at least using a different internal representation, perhaps supporting TAI). This is a great opportunity to implement two requests at once. Some people want high precision datetime objects while others would like to see a datetime implementation that works with dates BC.

Beware, people requesting dates BC rarely know what they are asking for. (E.g. Jesus wasn't born on 12/25/0001.) The calendrical ambiguities are such that representing dates that far in the past is better left to a specialized class. Read the original discussions about the datetime type; it loses meaning for dates long ago even if it can represent them, but the choice was made to ignore these and to offer a uniform abstraction for 1 <= year <= 9999. TBH I'm more worried about years >= 10000. :-)

from datetime import datetime, timedelta epoch = datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1) epoc - timedelta(days=1969*365.242) datetime.datetime(1, 1, 1, 12, 2, 52, 799998) epoch - timedelta(days=1970*365.242) Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in OverflowError: date value out of range 2. I don't think the stdlib is the right place to define the initial version of this. +1

+1

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

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