[Python-Dev] datetime nanosecond support

[Guido van Rossum]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 7:11 AM, Christian Heimes <lists at cheimes.de> wrote:
> Am 25.07.2012 14:11, schrieb Nick Coghlan:
>> 1. For the reasons presented, I think it's worth attempting to define
>> a common API that is based on datetime, but is tailored towards high
>> precision time operations (at least using a different internal
>> representation, perhaps supporting TAI).
>
> This is a great opportunity to implement two requests at once. Some
> people want high precision datetime objects while others would like to
> see a datetime implementation that works with dates BC.

Beware, people requesting dates BC rarely know what they are asking
for. (E.g. Jesus wasn't born on 12/25/0001.) The calendrical
ambiguities are such that representing dates that far in the past is
better left to a specialized class. Read the original discussions
about the datetime type; it loses meaning for dates long ago even if
it can represent them, but the choice was made to ignore these and to
offer a uniform abstraction for 1 <= year <= 9999. TBH I'm more
worried about years >= 10000. :-)

>>>> from datetime import datetime, timedelta
>>>> epoch = datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1)
>>>> epoc - timedelta(days=1969*365.242)
> datetime.datetime(1, 1, 1, 12, 2, 52, 799998)
>>>> epoch - timedelta(days=1970*365.242)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> OverflowError: date value out of range
>
>
>> 2. I don't think the stdlib is the right place to define the initial
>> version of this.
>
> +1

+1

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)