[Python-Dev] iso8601 parsing

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 3:48 PM, Alex Walters <tritium-list at sdamon.com> wrote:
>  Why make parsing ISO time special?

It's not the ISO format per se that is special, but parsing of str(x).
For all numeric types, int, float, complex and even
fractions.Fraction, we have a roundtrip invariant T(str(x)) == x.
Datetime types are a special kind of numbers, but they don't follow
this established pattern.  This is annoying when you deal with time
series where it is common to have text files with a mix of dates,
timestamps and numbers.  You can write generic code to deal with ints
and floats, but have to special-case anything time related.