[Python-Dev] Status on PEP-431 Timezones

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Wed Apr 15 21:57:25 CEST 2015


On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 1:43 AM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 11:10 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Bikeshed: Would arithmetic be based on UTC time or Unix time? It'd be
>> more logical to describe it as "adding six hours means adding six
>> hours to the UTC time", but it'd look extremely odd when there's a
>> leap second.
>
> It would ignore leap seconds. If you want to call that unix time or
> not is a matter of opinion. Hm. I guess the internal representation
> *could* be EPOCH + offset, and local times could be calculated
> properties, which could be cached (or possibly calculated at
> creation).

I was just talking about leap seconds, here (which Unix time ignores),
not about the internal representation, which is an implementation
detail. If a timedelta is represented as a number of seconds, then
"adding six hours" really means "adding 6*3600 seconds", and most
people would be VERY surprised if one of those is "consumed" by a leap
second; but it ought at least to be acknowledged in the docs.

ChrisA


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