[Python-Dev] float atime/mtime/ctime - a bad idea?

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I just found a place in my own code that broke because stat now
> returns floats for mtime etc.  I was using a Zope "OIBTree" object,
> which is a dict-like extension type mapping strings to ints; it
> very reasonbly doesn't like it if you assign a float to it.
> 
> I'm not say that because *my* code breaks, this is a bad feature.  But
> I am worried that we'll find more programs using external data types
> that won't accept floats (I'm thinking of Numpy arrays), and I'm now
> not so sure if this is acceptable breakage...  Apparently the fact
> that it "works" on the Mac isn't really a great proof.
> 
> Maybe we can introduce a variant of the stat() function that returns
> floats, or alternative field names that are only available when using
> attributes (not when using the tuple-ish API)?

If you're suggesting a new API, why not have it return one of
the new datetime objects ?

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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