[Datetime-SIG] Another round on error-checking

[Chris Barker]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 4:55 PM, Alexander Belopolsky <
alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:


> Doc patches from good writers are always welcome, but in this case, I
> don't see what needs to be added to what the reference manual already says:
>

Wow -- I did not find that when I went looking early in this thread -- so
maybe not missing, but not in an easy  to find place.

The trick with docs is that:

a) people don't read them ;-)

b) OK, they do when they can't figure out how to do something -- in which
case, they read as little as they can to solve their problem.

The trick with datetime arithmetic is that people come to it with an
expectation of how it works, so we want to make sure they won't go away
with that that expectation (if it's wrong) with a quick read of the docs.
This is particularly a problem because datetime arithmetic behaves like
both Period and Duration arithmetic if you stay away from DST -- so folks
can come in with either expectation and their code could work fine, and not
find an the issue until it fails next fall.

And yes, I could have written some nice doc patches with the time I've
spent on this thread -- but that's less fun!

And maybe we should wait for post-PEP, so we know what to write (if
anything different).

-Chris

> https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.datetime
>
> The only improvement that comes to mind is to make "Supported operations:"
> a linkable section.
>



-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

Emergency Response Division
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Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
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