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To: python-list@python.org
From: Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: YADTR (Yet Another DateTime Rant)
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 19:25:45 -0400
Organization: IISS Elusive Unicorn
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:69152

On Tue, 25 Mar 2014 20:58:27 -0400, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> declaimed the
following:

>One of my roles on this newsgroup is to periodically whine about 
>stupidities in the Python datetime module.  This is one of those times.
>
>I have some code which computes how long ago the sun set.  Being a nice 
>pythonista, I'm using a timedelta to represent this value.  It would be 
>difficult to imagine a less useful default way to print a timedelta:
>
>previous sunset: -1 day, 22:25:26.295993
>
>The idea of str() is that it's supposed to return a human-friendly 
>representation of a value.  Humans do not say things like, "The sun set 
>1 day ago plus 22 hours and 25 minutes".

	Makes sense to me -- the key being time DELTA... IE, a difference from
some (unspecified) instance in time...

	If you want an instance of time, you need to add some known instance
and the delta value.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/