[Python-Dev] PEP: New timestamp formats

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 02, 2012, at 11:07 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

>Yup, that's why your middle-ground approach didn't make any sense to
>me. Returning Decimal when a flag is set to request high precision
>values actually handles everything (since any epoch related questions
>only arise later when converting the decimal timestamp to an absolute
>time value).

Guido really dislikes APIs where a flag changes the return type, and I agree
with him.  It's because this is highly unreadable:

    results = blah.whatever(True)

What the heck does that `True` do?  It can be marginally better with a
keyword-only argument, but not much.

I haven't read the whole thread so maybe this is a stupid question, but why
can't we add a datetime-compatible higher precision type that hides all the
implementation details?

-Barry