I have written the callout to strptime.strptime (strptime is SF patch #474274) as Guido asked. Since that was the current hold-up and the thread has gone dormant, I figured I should summarize the discussion up to this point. 1) what is the need?: The question was raised why this was done. The answer was that since time is just a wrapper around time.h, strptime was not guaranteed since it is not a part of ANSI C. Some ANSI C libraries include it, though (like glibc), because it is so useful. Unfortunately Windows and OS X do not have it. Having it in Python means it is completely portable and no longer reliant on the ANSI C library being kind enough to provide it. 2) strftime dependence: Some people worried about the dependence upon strftime for calculating some info. But since strftime is guaranteed to be there by Python (since it is a part of ANSI C), the dependence is not an issue. 3) locale info for dates: Skip and Guido pointed out that calendar.py now generates the names of the weekdays and months on the fly similar to my solution. So I did go ahead and use it. But Skip pointed out that perhaps we should centralize any code that calculates locale info for dates (calendar.py's names and my code for figuring out format for date/time). I had suggested adding it to the locale module and Guido responded that Martin had to ok that. Martin hasn't responded to that idea. 4) location of strptime: Skip asked why Guido was having me write the callout patch to timemodule.c. He wondered why Lib/time.py wasn't just created holding my code and then renaming timemodule.c to _timemodule.c and importing it at the end of time.py. No response has been given thus far for that. I also suggested a possible time2 where things like strptime, my helper fxns (calculate the Julian date from the Gregorian date, etc.), and things such as naivetime could be kept. That would allow time to stay as a straight wrapper to time.h while all bonus code gets relegated to time2. Guido said it might be a good idea but would have to wait until he got back from vacation. That pretty much sums up everything to this point; hope I got it right and didn't miss anything. -Brett C.