What do you do when a date or time is incompletely specified? ISTM, that as it is, there is no formal way to store this --- you have to guess, and there's no way to indicate that the guess is different from solid information. As a result, I have sometimes had to abandon datetime, even though it seemed like the logical choice for representing data.
E.g. I might have information like "this paper was published in May 1997". There's no way to write that with datetime, is there? Even if I just use the "date" object instead of datetime, I still have to actually specify something like May 1, 1997 --- fabricating data, which is frequently undesireable (later on, I might find information saying that it was actually published May 23, 1997 and I might want to update the earlier one, or simply evaluate them as "equal" since they are, to within the precision given --- for example, I might be trying to decide that two database entries are really duplicate references to the same paper). I know that this is somewhat theoretically stated, but I have run into to concrete problems along the lines of the above. I'd say this is analogous to how you might use "None" rather than "0" to represent an integer if you don't know it's value (rather than knowing that it is zero). ISTM, you ought to be able to specify a date as, e.g.: d = datetime.date(2005, 5, None) I realize there might be some complexity with deciding how to handle datestamp math, but as this situation occurs frequently in real life, it seems like it shouldn't be avoided. How do other people deal with this kind of problem? Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
