On 2015-04-04 21:16, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Mark Lawrence
mailto:breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: I don't understand why people bother with this gentleman.
I did see constructive input from Anatoly on the bug tracker before. I believe other developers did too. Granted, in the last few years signal-to-noise ratio in his posts was rather low, but I usually ignore the "from:" header in the technical discussions.
I am genuinely interested in the ways to improve date/time formatting in Python. There are certainly better ways than stftime. For example, ICU has a date/time format syntax that is much more readable: instead of "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", ICU format is "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss".
I don't think it is hard to find a way to introduce ICU format in datetime.__format__ while preserving backward compatibility. For example, we may require that % is always "escaped" as '%' in ICU format and the presence of unescaped % can trigger strftime interpretation.
Personally, I prefer some kind of escaping, possibly in the style of .format, e.g. "{year}-{month}-{day} {hour}:{minute}:{second}". (It'll probably need a little tinkering to shorten it! :-))