[Python-Dev] Proposing an alternative to PEP 410

[Victor Stinner]

> Scratch that, *I* don't agree. timedelta is a pretty clumsy type to
> use. Have you ever tried to compute the number of seconds between two
> datetimes? You can't just use the .seconds field, you have to combine
> the .days and .seconds fields. And negative timedeltas are even harder
> due to the requirement that seconds and microseconds are never
> negative; e.g -1 second is represented as -1 days plus 86399 seconds.

Guido, you should switch to Python3! timedelta has a new
total_seconds() method since Python 3.2.
http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/datetime.html#datetime.timedelta.total_seconds

>>> datetime.timedelta(1).total_seconds()
86400.0
>>> datetime.timedelta(seconds=-1).total_seconds()
-1.0

Victor