On Feb 3, 2012 2:59 AM, "Barry Warsaw" <ba...@python.org> wrote: > > On Feb 02, 2012, at 11:07 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote: > > >Yup, that's why your middle-ground approach didn't make any sense to > >me. Returning Decimal when a flag is set to request high precision > >values actually handles everything (since any epoch related questions > >only arise later when converting the decimal timestamp to an absolute > >time value). > > Guido really dislikes APIs where a flag changes the return type, and I agree > with him. It's because this is highly unreadable: > > results = blah.whatever(True) > > What the heck does that `True` do? It can be marginally better with a > keyword-only argument, but not much.
Victor's patch passes in the return type rather than a binary flag, thus avoiding this particular problem. > I haven't read the whole thread so maybe this is a stupid question, but why > can't we add a datetime-compatible higher precision type that hides all the > implementation details? > > -Barry It's not a stupid question, but for backwards compatibility, what we would actually need is a version of Decimal that implicitly interoperates with binary floats. That's... not trivial. Cheers, Nick -- Sent from my phone, thus the relative brevity :)
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