On 18/11/12 01:42, Dr. Volker Jaenisch wrote:
@jeremy: Why did you used such a special format? Is this easy to substitute by
an other?
Hi Volker
Date/time wasn't in the originally program. It was the easiest way of
supporting dates without adding other data types (I think it was added
even before adding text), allowing the datasets to be plotted with
standard widgets. There was some discussion on the mailing list I think.
The idea is to use floats to store date times relative to a recent time.
Excel and various other systems do this - they can be converted with an
offset. I think I calculated that the accuracy is pretty good over quite
a wide range in times. It's probably not good enough to store
microseconds millions of years ago, but there is little use case for
that. There was no numpy datetime when the code was written.
Is there any case where it is broken? I think it will be pretty tricky
to change.
1. Backward compatibility - though the format isn't designed to be used
externally, older saved files may contain these values.
2. Widgets assume numeric data - lots of special casing needs to be
added to each widget to handle the different data types. Maybe it would
be possible to restrict
If you can think of a clean way to change the system (with
compatibility), and little extra code, I'd be happy to change it. For
instance, you could store it as a very large integer instead, which
might work ok.
Jeremy
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