On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 4:06 AM, Marcos Bonci <marcos.bonci@gmail.com> wrote:
It's very nice of you to attribute such a great post to me, but I just linked to it. I'm not the author of any of the resources I linked to.
Oops, lack-of-sleep in action!.. Being myself an example of the inattentive guy I was talking about, I guess...
One of the issues from what I understand is that you pretty much need to be a specialist in the time/date domain (or have one available at all times) to get this stuff right. I'm guessing the Python community doesn't have any involved/available, least of which at the core level.
Furthermore if you want to see what's usually considered a best-of-breed in the java world, look not at the standard library but at joda time [1]. In fact, with Java 7 the current Date/Calendar API should be replaced by one strongly inspired by Joda (and created by its author) and influenced by a few other APIs of the Java world. See JSR 310 for details [2], though note that the inclusion in Java 7 apparently isn't certain yet due to delays in the JSR 310 process [3].
For a (probably long outdated) overview of what JSR 310 would provide, see [4]
[1] http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=310 [3] http://tech.puredanger.com/java7 [4] http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/09/18/jsr-310-new-java-date-time-api....
Since it's all open source stuff, shouldn't it be possible to just "clone" most of it? Or is there some Java-specific thing that makes it hard to translate?
Doubtful, but anyhow, I hear mxDateTime (http://www.egenix.com/products/python/mxBase/mxDateTime/ ) is the current and extant Python gold standard. Not quite as nimble as Joda (though not many applications need to deal with e.g. Coptic dates anyway), but still a significant improvement over `datetime`. Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com