Jan. 4, 2011
4:12 p.m.
On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 7:47 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
Given the rule garbage in -> garbage out, I'd do the most useful thing, which would be to produce a longer output string (and update the docs).
I did not know that GIGO was a design rule, but after thinking about it some more, I agree. It is very unlikely that a Python program would care about precise length of the string produced by time.asctime() and these strings are not well suited for passing timestamps to other programs that may care. (Use of asctime() timestamps in internet protocols has been long deprecated and surely won't be in use in 10-th millennium :-)