[Python-Dev] proposal: add basic time type to the standard library

[Guido van Rossum]

> > The timetuple() method provides access to all of these
> > simultaneously.  Isn't that enough? 
> 
> From a minimalist point of view, yet, but from a usability point 
> of view, no.
> 
> > t.year() could be spelled as
> > t.timetuple()[0]. 
> 
> Yes, but t.year() is a lot more readable.

When do you ever use this in isolation?  I'd expect in 99% of the
cases you hand it off to a formatting routine, and guess what --
strftime() takes a time tuple.

I worry about the time wasted by calling all of t.year(), t.month(),
t.day() (etc.) -- given that they do so little, the call overhead is
probably near 100%.

I wonder how often this is needed.  The only occurrences of year() in
the entire Zope source that I found are in various test routines.

> > I expect that usually you'd request several of
> > these together anyway, in order to do some fancy formatting, so the
> > timetuple() approach makes sense.
> 
> I find the time tuples to be really inconvenient. I *always*
> have to slice off the parts I don't want, which I find annoying.

Serious question: what do you tend to do with time values?  I imagine
that once we change strftime() to accept an abstract time object,
you'll never need to call either timetuple() or year() -- strftime()
will do it for you.

> Hm, now that I mention the extra parts, it seems kind of silly
> to make implementors of the type come up with weekday, julian day, and
> a daylight-savings flag. This time format is really biased by
> the C time library, which is fine for a module that wraps the C library
> but seems a bit silly for a standard date-time interface.

That's why /F's pre-PEP allows the implementation to leaves these
three set to -1.

> > > with date parts
> > > being one based and time parts being zero based.
> > 
> > I'm not sure what you mean here.
> 
> Years, months, and days should start from 1.
> Hours, minutes and seconds should start from 0.
> 
> One confusion I often have with time tuples is that I know
> too much about C's time struct, which numbers months from 0
> and which has years since 1900. 

I guess that confusion is yours alone.  In Python, of course month and
day start from 1.  Whether years start from 1 is a theological
question. :-)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)