[Python-Dev] PEP: New timestamp formats

[Victor Stinner]

> Even if I like the idea, I don't think that we need all this machinery
> to support nanosecond resolution. I should maybe forget my idea of
> using datetime.datetime or datetime.timedelta, or only only support
> int, float and decimal.Decimal.

I updated my patch (issue #13882) to only support int, float and
decimal.Decimal types. I suppose that it is just enough.

Only adding decimal.Decimal type avoids many questions:

 - which API / protocol should be used to support other types
 - what is the start of a timestamp?
 - etc.

As we seen: using time.time(timestamp=type) API, it will be easy to
support new types later (using a new protocol, a registry like Unicode
codecs, or anything else).

Let's start with decimal.Decimal and support it correctly (e.g. patch
datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp() and os.*utime*() functions).

Victor