Hi! I've been working a lot with date/time variables lately, and maybe it's just me, and maybe I just don't get it yet, but it sure doesn't feel like there's one-and-only-one elegant, obvious way to work with them. Feels like working with strings in C. So I was thinking, have date and time literals ever been seriously discussed anywhere in these discussion lists? (If so, I apologize in advance for reviving this subject.) Is there any chance we could ever see date/time literals in Python? Perhaps as a top-level abstraction itself, or as a subclass of numbers.Number, or even as common float or int (by adding attributes regarding specific properties of a number's date/time interpretation, e.g. "<2010-12-31>.incr_month(2) == <2011-02-28>" -- just an example though, i don't really think this exact method would be practical). If we adopt a standard like ISO 8601, then we automatically get an unambiguous one-to-one relationship between (date+time) and (amount of time elapsed from <epoch>), over a continuous, infinite domain (towards +inf and -inf). Very often the "time elapsed" value is what we really want (or at least the absolute difference between two values, which is of course easier to find in this form), and besides being more compact and flexible, no functionality is lost. I guess the most controversial point here would be the meaning of arithmetic operations between dates (or the very validity of such operations). Another (not so obvious) problem is leap seconds (btw, who the hell invented that?!..). It's a weird and complicated problem, but I think it's not impossible to turn this "complicated" into just "complex", keeping the tricky concepts buried inside the implementation. Anyway, here's a couple of suggestions for a syntax: 2010.05.29 + 20.06.17 2010.05.29d + 20.06.17t (just like complex literals) So, what do you guys think? I'd love to hear others' opinions, even if it's just for me to understand what I got wrong and see the obvious way that's already there :) PS: Just for fun, is there a standard way I could experiment with creating new types of literals? -- Marcos --