[Python-Dev] Status on PEP-431 Timezones (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Wed Apr 15 21:57:25 CEST 2015

On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 1:43 AM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 11:10 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

Bikeshed: Would arithmetic be based on UTC time or Unix time? It'd be more logical to describe it as "adding six hours means adding six hours to the UTC time", but it'd look extremely odd when there's a leap second. It would ignore leap seconds. If you want to call that unix time or not is a matter of opinion. Hm. I guess the internal representation could be EPOCH + offset, and local times could be calculated properties, which could be cached (or possibly calculated at creation).

I was just talking about leap seconds, here (which Unix time ignores), not about the internal representation, which is an implementation detail. If a timedelta is represented as a number of seconds, then "adding six hours" really means "adding 6*3600 seconds", and most people would be VERY surprised if one of those is "consumed" by a leap second; but it ought at least to be acknowledged in the docs.

ChrisA

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