On 01/09/2014 06:57 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:14 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote:
Thanks for this collection! Now we can discuss.
[snip]
Datetimes are self-describing. If I have a datetime or a timedelta, I
know what I've got. I've written more than one bug where I assumed a
number somebody handed me was in seconds but it turned out to be in ms.
That can never happen with a timedelta. We do a lot of stuff in
javascript, where times are ms, so this is a common problem for us.
Sure. Though that's no different from other cases where you need
out-of-band information to understand something, as we've just been
discussing in the threads about text handling - if you have a puddle
of bytes, you can't decode them to text without knowing what the
encoding is. [1] If your data's coming from JS, it won't be a
timedelta, it'll be a number; at some point you have to turn that into
a timedelta object, so you still have the same problem.
Yup, and you do at the boundary instead of having a float wandering through your code with an easily forgotten meta-data
type.
So what I'm seeing here is that the direct use of a time_t will cover
everything in an ugly way, but that a class wrapping it up could fix
that. And fundamentally, the only problem with datetime (which, for
the most part, is exactly that wrapper) is that it's unobvious how to
get a simple UTC timestamp.
It has at least one other problem: bool(midnight) == False.
--
~Ethan~
[1] Yes, I said "puddle of bytes". What would you call it? Am
interested to hear!
I think that's a perfect name! :)
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