YADTR (Yet Another DateTime Rant)

[Jean-Michel Pichavant]

----- Original Message -----
> One of my roles on this newsgroup is to periodically whine about
> stupidities in the Python datetime module.  This is one of those
> times.
> 
> I have some code which computes how long ago the sun set.  Being a
> nice
> pythonista, I'm using a timedelta to represent this value.  It would
> be
> difficult to imagine a less useful default way to print a timedelta:
> 
> previous sunset: -1 day, 22:25:26.295993
> 
> The idea of str() is that it's supposed to return a human-friendly
> representation of a value.  Humans do not say things like, "The sun
> set
> 1 day ago plus 22 hours and 25 minutes".

I can think of a less useful default way:

previous sunset: 1 sunset ago

This is how humans have been saying things for thousands of years before inventing the clock.
Beside that, I think datetime has all the formatters required to do pretty much anything.

Note : I don't see what's wrong in your example, however I have the feeling the term "stupiditie" is a little bit strong ;)

JM





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