[Numpy-discussion] Time Zones and datetime64

[Riccardo De Maria]

Daniele Nicolodi <daniele <at> grinta.net> writes:
> 
> On 10/04/2013 18:55, Riccardo De Maria wrote:
> > The library should handle correctly leap seconds, otherwise using unix time
> > as a floating point number is already sufficient for many applications.
> 
> Please define what you mean by "handle correctly leap seconds".

I know they are not predictable but one can always update a file or the
binary itself for the ones introduced over the years.

I mentioned leap seconds because it is only feature that I see that has deep
implication in the implementaion and that may be useful to people that needs
to compute precise time delta between time stamped events or need to parse
dates like 2012-06-30T23:59:60UTC.

At the moment I use unix time since leap seconds would be a corner case for
me that I can handle manually. Unix time can be converted from and to date
string using datetime and pytz and this is needed only during io operations,
can be used as coordinates in matplotlib plots without or with a trivial
customized ticker, time deltas are just differences (although not always
physically accurate), can be used as a timestamp (with glitches during the
leap second).

But please take this comment as suggestions, I only wanted to share my use case.

Riccardo