[Python-Dev] PEP: New timestamp formats

[Glenn Linderman]

On 2/2/2012 6:28 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Feb 2012 15:09:41 +0100
> Victor Stinner<victor.stinner at haypocalc.com>  wrote:
>
>>> Why int? That doesn't seem to bring anything.
>> It helps to deprecate/replace os.stat_float_times(), which may be used
>> for backward compatibility (with Python 2.2 ? :-)).
> I must admit I don't understand the stat_float_times documentation:
>
> “For compatibility with older Python versions, accessing stat_result as
> a tuple always returns integers.
>
> Python now returns float values by default. Applications which do not
> work correctly with floating point time stamps can use this function to
> restore the old behaviour.”
>
> These two paragraphs seem to contradict themselves.
>
>
> That said, I don't understand why we couldn't simply deprecate
> stat_float_times() right now. Having an option for integer timestamps
> is pointless, you can just call int() on the result if you want.
>
> Regards
>
> Antoine.

Sorry to bring this up, but the PEP should probably consider another 
option: Introducing a precedent following os.stat_decimal_times().  Like 
os.stat_float_times, it would decide the return types of timestamps from 
os.stat.  Or something along that line.  Having it affect the results of 
time.time would be weird, though.  And the whole design of 
os.stat_float_times smells of something being designed wrong in the 
first place, to need such an API to retain backward compatibility.  But 
I'm not sure it is, even yet, designed for such flexibility.
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