In article <mailman.5244.1389254198.18130.python-l...@python.org>, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What can you (Roy), with your use-case, achieve with datetime that > you can't achieve (at least reasonably easily) with a timestamp? As I'm mentioned several times, when you print a datetime, you get something that's human friendly. When you print a timestamp (i.e. a float), you get a lot of digits. I don't know about you, but I can't look at 1389274842 and get any feel for whether that was in the middle of the night or at 5 in the afternoon, near our peak traffic time. Nor can I tell if it was today, yesterday, last month, or a week from next Tuesday. Datetimes make it easy to do things like, "find the time of the preceding (or following) midnight". Or, "what month is this timestamp part of?" These are operations we need to do a lot, to answer questions like, "How many unique users did we have on a given day?", or "Which monthly database archive file do I need to grab to get information about this historical event?" Datetimes are self-documenting. If I'm in the python shell and have something called t, I can do help(t) or dir(t) to find out what operations it has. Datetimes are self-describing. If I have a datetime or a timedelta, I know what I've got. I've written more than one bug where I assumed a number somebody handed me was in seconds but it turned out to be in ms. That can never happen with a timedelta. We do a lot of stuff in javascript, where times are ms, so this is a common problem for us. Oh, and another thing I can do with a datetime that I can't do with a unix timestamp. I can represent the day I was born. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
