On 6 March 2014 10:33, M.-A. Lemburg
It is not a coincidence, IMO, that the three persons arguing that the current behaviour is reasonable are implementors of datetime modules: you, Tim and Alexander. All other people find the behaviour baffling.
I'm not so sure. Of course, people who have been doing date/time stuff will jump into discussions that deal with them, but the same argument triggering this thread could have applied to other Python types and you would then have a different group of people argue for plausibility of the choice.
I had promised to stay out of this discussion as I no longer thing it adds much value (note that the bug has been reopened long since) and I was getting tired of having people decide that I'd said something I didn't mean. But just to add a perspective from someone who *doesn't* develop a datetime module, I encounter "special" midnight values very often. Databases (at least Oracle, and I believe others) typically store date values ("Thursday 6th March 2014") as a timestamp value with midnight as a time part. So checking the time part of a datetime value for midnight as a "special, means omitted" value is not uncommon in that domain. Paul