On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 13:44, Christopher Barker <[email protected]> wrote: > Pierre GM wrote:
>> Anyhow, years and months are simple enough. > > no, they are not -- they are fundamentally different than hours, days, etc. That doesn't make them *difficult*. It's tricky to convert between months and hours, yes, but that's not the only operation that we're looking to represent. A *ton* of important time series are in these calendrical units (monthly, semi-monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.). If you collect economic data on a monthly basis, you don't need to unambiguously convert "January 2011" to a microsecond timestamp. You do need to be able to "add 6 months", "add 1 year", and "roll up each 3 month period into quarters", etc. Each of those operations *is* unambiguous. The data simply doesn't represent microsecond-sized events. The machinery to handle both is basically the same inside their areas of applicability; you just have to disallow certain ambiguous conversions between them, as Pierre suggests. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list [email protected] http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
