[Python-ideas] Date/time literals

[Masklinn]

On 2010-05-30, at 12:39 , Marcos Bonci wrote:
> 
> From Masklinn's post in his blog:
> 
It's very nice of you to attribute such a great post to me, but
I just linked to it. I'm not the author of any of the resources
I linked to.

> I like Python because I can usually rely on its "magic" and just
> care about what's elegant and readable (or else I would be using C).
> Judging from your personal experience, the magic looks more like
> illusionism when it comes to dates. Maybe this matter deserves
> closer attention in the context of the language/stdlibs than it has
> received so far? After all it's time we're talking about, it's not like
> it's something unimportant or rarely used (and it's something I
> would definitely expect to be able to rely on Python for, since
> pretty much everything else Python is just awesome).

One of the issues from what I understand is that you pretty much need
to be a specialist in the time/date domain (or have one available at
all times) to get this stuff right. I'm guessing the Python community
doesn't have any involved/available, least of which at the core level.

Furthermore if you want to see what's usually considered a
best-of-breed in the java world, look not at the standard library but
at joda time [1]. In fact, with Java 7 the current Date/Calendar API
should be replaced by one strongly inspired by Joda (and created by
its author) and influenced by a few other APIs of the Java world. See
JSR 310 for details [2], though note that the inclusion in Java 7
apparently isn't certain yet due to delays in the JSR 310 process [3].

For a (probably long outdated) overview of what JSR 310 would provide,
see [4]

[1] http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=310
[3] http://tech.puredanger.com/java7
[4] http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/09/18/jsr-310-new-java-date-time-api.html