[Python-Dev] Store timestamps as decimal.Decimal objects

[Mark Shannon]

Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 7:13 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>> On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:11:37 +1000
>> Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Having a low-level module like os needing to know about higher-level
>>> types like decimal.Decimal and datetime.datetime (or even timedelta)
>>> should be setting off all kinds of warning bells.
>> Decimal is ideally low-level (it's a number), it's just that it has a
>> complicated high-level implementation :)
> 
> FWIW, my vote is also for Decimal and against datetime or timedelta.
> (I dream of Decimal replacing float in Python 4000, so take my vote
> with an appropriate amount of salt. :-)

Why not add a new function rather than modifying time.time()?
(after all its just a timestamp, does it really need nanosecond precision?)

For those who do want super-accuracy then add a new function
time.picotime() (it could be nanotime but why not future proof it :) )
which returns an int represent the number of picoseconds since the
epoch. ints never loose precision and never overflow.

Cheers,
Mark.