On 27.03.2014 11:44, Chris Angelico wrote: > It's not "equally braindead", it follows a simple and logical rule: > Only the day portion is negative.
The more I think about it, the sillier this rule seems to me. A timedelta is a *whole* object. Either the whole delta is negative or it is not. It doesn't make sense to split it up in two parts and arbitrarily define one to be always nonnegative and the other to have no restrictions. The only locical reasoning behind this could be to argue that "-2 days" makes more sense than "-15 minutes". Which it doesn't. Worse: Negating a timedelta (which I would argue is a fairly common operation) makes the whole thing unstable representation-wise: >>> str(datetime.timedelta(2, 30)) '2 days, 0:00:30' >>> str(-datetime.timedelta(2, 30)) '-3 days, 23:59:30' And it makes it extremely error-prone to the reader: >>> str(datetime.timedelta(0, -1)) '-1 day, 23:59:59' This looks MUCH more like "almost two days ago" than '-00:00:01' does. In any case, the str() function is *only* about the representation that can be read by humans. Therefore its highest priority should be to output something that can, in fact, be easily parsed by humans. The current format is nothing of the sort. Cheers, Johannes -- >> Wo hattest Du das Beben nochmal GENAU vorhergesagt? > Zumindest nicht öffentlich! Ah, der neueste und bis heute genialste Streich unsere großen Kosmologen: Die Geheim-Vorhersage. - Karl Kaos über Rüdiger Thomas in dsa <hidbv3$om2$1...@speranza.aioe.org> -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
