On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Johannes Bauer <dfnsonfsdu...@gmx.de> wrote: > On 27.03.2014 11:44, Chris Angelico wrote: >> On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 9:22 PM, Johannes Bauer <dfnsonfsdu...@gmx.de> wrote: >>> Besides, there's an infinite amount of (braindead) timedelta string >>> representations. For your -30 hours, it is perfectly legal to say >>> >>> 123 days, -2982 hours >>> >>> Yet Python doesn't (but chooses an equally braindead representation). >> >> It's not "equally braindead", it follows a simple and logical rule: >> Only the day portion is negative. That might not be perfectly suited >> to all situations, but it does mean that adding and subtracting whole >> days will never change the representation of the time. That's a >> reasonable promise. > > Why would the stability of the *string* output of the time > representation be of any interest whatsoever? Do you have any even > halfways reasonable usecase for that? > >> What you propose is completely arbitrary, > > No. What I propose is that for t > 0 this holds: > > "-" + str(t) == str(-t) > > Which is far from arbitrary.
When you said "equally braindead", I took that as indicating that the current representation is as braindead as "123 days, -2982 hours". My point is that it's not as arbitrary as that. Your "real proposal", if you like, is arguably better; but I'm just saying that the current one isn't arbitrary. > It follows "natural" rules of inverting > something (-abs(x) == -x), and it yields a (truly) human-readable form > of showing a timedelta. > > Please don't mix this up with the very apparent braindead proposal of > mine. In case you didn't notice, this was irony at work. The word > "braindead" I chose to describe the format should have tipped you off to > that. Yes, I knew that that was irony. I was taking argument with your declaration that the current form is just as bad. Taking it to a different type: The repr() of a string tries to be short, where possible, by using either single or double quotes, but won't use a raw representation, nor triple-quoted: >>> ' \' ' " ' " >>> " \" " ' " ' >>> ' \"\'\"\'\"\'\"\' ' ' "\'"\'"\'"\' ' >>> " \"\'\"\'\"\'\"\' " ' "\'"\'"\'"\' ' >>> ''' "'"'"'"' ''' ' "\'"\'"\'"\' ' >>> r' \\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ' ' \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ' You could argue that representing a string as raw or triple-quoted would be "more correct", and yet the current repr is not arbitrary. The current form is not actively bad, even if it would be possible to find something better. >>> Where can I enter a PIP that proposes that all timedelta strings are >>> fixed at 123 days (for positive, non-prime amount of seconds) and fixed >>> at -234 days (for all negative or positive prime amount of seconds)? >> >> Doesn't need a PEP. Just subclass it or monkey-patch it and use it as >> you will. :) > > Nonono, you misunderstand: I want everyone to suffer under the braindead > representation, just as it is now! Oh, absolutely! In that case, just slip a patch into the next point release; people won't mind that changing in 3.4.1! ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
