On Mon, 26 Jan 2015 22:44:40 +1100 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 10:14:23AM +0100, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
On Mon, 26 Jan 2015 09:24:07 +0100 Thomas Güttler <guettliml@thomas-guettler.de> wrote:
PostgreSQL can store the representation of an “infinite” date, timestamp, or interval. Infinite dates are not available to Python, so these objects are mapped to date.max, datetime.max, interval.max. Unfortunately the mapping cannot be bidirectional so these dates will be stored back into the database with their values, such as 9999-12-31.
Unless someone has a real-world use for the values of date.max, datetime.max, interval.max, I find it rather counter-productive to not store them back as infinities.
That would make them de-facto infinities that weirdly don't look like infinities:
That would only make them infinities in PostgreSQL. That sounds like a reasonable compromise for a probably little-used feature, and uncommon values.
Adding infinities to the datetime module would probably be possible but someone has to figure out the arithmetic rules. Do we need "not a time" when adding infinity to -infinity?
I shouldn't think so. The purpose of NANs in IEEE-754 maths is to allow the programmer to delay dealing with the failed operation until the end of the calculation. I don't think that date calculations tend to be anywhere as complicated as mathematical ones, so it would be acceptable to just raise an exception.
Note Numpy datetimes and timedeltas do have a concept of "NotATime". But, yes, it's an unexpected feature. Regards Antoine.