Python wins again!

[Alan Green]

A colleague of mine - who wishes to remain anonymous to the world at
large - just sent me the following. Waaaayyy cool!

> Just a little of tale of why I enjoy having Python as a tool.
> 
> I had a time, represented in the standard Unix 
> seconds-since-epoch format. 
> I wanted to know what the date of this time was, and for some 
> reason couldn't do this in my head.
> 
> Now, I knew that the Python time module could do this, but I 
> couldn't for the life of me remember which method I needed.
> 
> Enter my hack (done at command prompt)
> 
> >>> import time
> >>> a = 941598773
> >>> for f in dir(time):
> ...     str = "time.%s(%d)" %(f,a)
> ...     try:
> ...             print eval(str)
> ...     except:
> ...             pass
> ...
> Wed Nov 03 13:12:53 1999
> (1999, 11, 3, 3, 12, 53, 2, 307, 0)
> (1999, 11, 3, 13, 12, 53, 2, 307, 0)
> >>>
> 
> A small problem is that, while I have the answer, I still 
> don't know what method it is. I should have written
> 
> 		print f, eval(str)
> 
> instead. But, as it stands, it was quicker to do this than to 
> consult the module reference.
>

He also adds:
> Seriously, which of these would you choose?
> >>> dir(time)
> ['__doc__', '__name__', 'accept2dyear', 'altzone', 'asctime', 
> 'clock', 'ctime', 'daylight', 'gmtime', 'localtime', 
> 'mktime', 'sleep', 'strftime', 'time', 'timezone', 'tzname']

For a laugh, just re-read that list and take a guess.

> The answer is ctime.

Alan.