[Zope] - Some DateTime behaviors I just don't understand

[Jim Fulton]

skip@calendar.com wrote:
> 
>     Jim> The problem is that DateTime wants to support offsets in seconds
>     Jim> from the epoc *and* offsets in days from 1901-01-01.  This approach
>     Jim> is flawed.  (It results from some interface baggage from some older
>     Jim> date-time implementations of mine.)
> 
>     Jim> I'm inclined to change DateTime to only expect epoch offsets in
>     Jim> seconds when a single numeric argument is given.  This will be
>     Jim> changed in the next release.
> 
> Since time.time() returns a float and the number of days since 1901-01-01
> would normally be considered an int,

That was not the intent.  You can have fractional days just as easily
as fractional seconds.

> why not interpret single floating point
> args as seconds since the Unix epoch and ints or longs as days since
> 1901-01-01?  This would be easily enough explained in the documentation and
> would perhaps induce less breakage in existing applications that use
> DateTime.

I don't think that this is going to break any current usage.

Note that I'm also changing __int__, __long__, and __float__
to return seconds since the epoch.  This will make:

  DateTime(float(d)) == d

In the current implementation, the above expression is
true sometimes, false others, and often raises an exception.

Jim

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