Extended date and time

[John Machin]

On Nov 11, 2:37 am, Jeremy Sanders <jeremy
+complangpyt... at jeremysanders.net> wrote:
> Hi - I need to add support to a program for dates and times. The built-in
> Python library seems to be okay for many purposes, but what I would like
> would be Unix epoch style times (seconds relative to some date), covering a
> large period from the past to the future. What would be nice would be a
> library which can take floating point seconds from an epoch.
>
> Does anyone know of a library which can convert from human style dates and
> times to a floating point epoch and back again? I expect I could fudge the
> fractional seconds with the built-in library, but I can't see how to get
> dates in the past.
>

What does "dates in the past" mean?? Please be more specific about the
earliest date that you want to be able to handle. Python's datetime
starts at 0001-01-01. Somebody mentioned the time module, which is
implementation-dependent but typically starts at 1970-01-01 .

What functionality do you need, other than two-way conversion between
days_since_epoch and (proleptic Gregorian) date/time?