comparing datetime with date

[Donnal Walter]

Steve Holden wrote:
> Comparing a datetime and a time makes little sense to me, and I'd prefer 
> to be forced to extract the time explicitly from the datetime before 
> comparison. A time specifies a point during *any* day, a datetime 
> specifies a single point in the time continuum.

Perhaps I am guilty of not explaining what I was trying to do. I have an 
abstract class (called Cell) that implements a form of the observable 
pattern. When x.set(...) is called, it check to see if the new value is 
different from the old value before making the change and notifying 
observers. The abstract Cell class has a lot of other functionality, as 
well, but this is the critical feature. Then I have at least three 
subclasses: one for text (strings), one for numbers, and one for 
timepoints. Althought the internal value representation is different for 
all three, they all use the same basic set(...) method. In my first 
implementation, the internal representation for TimePoint was going to 
be a datetime.datetime object. Sometimes, however, one knows a date 
without knowing the time (date of birth, for example, before knowing the 
time of birth, and this is important in newborn intensive care). I 
wanted to be able to enter the date of birth in a way that indicates 
that the time is unknown at present, so I used a datetime.date. Then 
later after the actual time is learned, it could be changed to a 
datetime.datetime. How else would the associated presenter (presentation 
object) know whether or not the time was unknown? But this means that 
for my implementation dt.date should not evaluate as equal to the 
corresponding dt.datetime.

My solution now (as a result of this thread) is to use a three-tuple for 
date of birth and a five-tuple for date and time of birth. These two 
representations obviously do evaluate as different. I still convert to 
datetime.datetime (with or without DST information) for calculations of 
intervals, but storage is the basic time tuple.

Kind regards,
Donnal Walter
Arkansas Children's Hospital