mxTools (was Re: why no "do : until"?)

[Alex Martelli]

"Robin Becker" <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message
news:L3JTK6ALVzW6Ewyk at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk...
    [snip]
> I'm a minimalist; let 100 flowers bloom, but the core should really only
> include the minimal required. Fancy dates are a bit too far for me. I

I don't mind this philosophy, but _decent_ (not _fancy_) date/time
handling should be among the libs distributed with Python, IMHO --
looks far more 'foundational' to me than (e.g.) all the modules now
documented in chapter 14 of the library reference, or, say, bisect,
fpformat, or imaplib.  If you added mxDateTime, while paring down
time a bit and perhaps removing calendar, you could end up with two
date-and-time-handling modules, one low-level and one high-level,
in a nice and very usable organization.

> like them, but would prefer such exotica to stay outside the main
> distribution. Same goes for a lot of other stuff eg idle tkinter etc
> etc. I reckon a lot of the desire for core growth would reduce if there
> were a CPAN like scheme for Python.

I fully agree on the latter point.  But a standard Python type to
represent date-and-time is needed (besides already-mentioned
relational databases) to interface to Corba, to COM, basically to
any "real-world programming framework" -- it's not just DBMS's
that care about date-and-time issues.  If possible, such a
foundational type should not be relegated to 'optional' status
any more than, say, complex numbers, file-objects, etc.


Alex