[Python-ideas] Reduce platform dependence of date and time related functions

[random832 at fastmail.us]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2013, at 3:42, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> I wonder why you'd want to use Unix ticks (what datetime calls a
> timestamp) as basis for cross-platform date/time calculations.

Because we've already got half a dozen APIs that use them. And there's
no particular reason to consider it _worse_ than any other scalar time
representation.

If we were defining the library from scratch today, we could argue the
merits of using days vs seconds vs microseconds as the unit, of 1970 vs
1904 vs 1600 vs 0000 for the epoch, and whether leap seconds should be
supported. But we've already got APIs that use time_t (and all supported
platforms define time_t as seconds since 1970)