[Python-ideas] Rename time module to "posixtime"

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 6:31 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> Terry Reedy wrote:
>> I believe deprecating (in the docs, at least) confusing near duplicates
>> would be improvement for newcomers.
>
> Agreed. It would be useful to add a note to the time module
> docs pointing newbies directly to the datetime module. For experts,
> the time module is still very useful to have around.

For myself, I think a long term plan (i.e. Py4k'ish) to move to a
_posixtime/posixtime C/Python hybrid implementation for the POSIX
timestamp manipulation would be beneficial. Largely, as Alexander
points out, to make the distinction between the time module, the
time.time function and datetime.time objects significantly clearer
than it is now:

>>> import time as time1
>>> from time import time as time2
>>> from datetime import time as time3
>>> time1
<module 'time' (built-in)>
>>> time2
<built-in function time>
>>> time3
<type 'datetime.time'>

We can at least cut down the naming conflict to only exist between the
latter two items.

Such a transition could be made in the documentation (with a note in
the "posixtime" documentation to say that it remains available as the
time module for backwards compatibility reasons)  as early as 3.2.

Of course, any functionality gaps identified in datetime would still
need to be closed.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia