On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 6:13 PM, Martin v. Löwis <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
..
>> I support this idea in theory, but as long as decimal is implemented
>> in Python, os module should probably expose a low level (tuple-based?)
>> interface and a higher level module would provide Decimal-based
>> high-precision time.
>
> Can you explain why you think so? I fail to see the connection.

One reason is the desire to avoid loading Python module from a
C-module.  I understand that this ship has already left the port with
larger and larger portions of stdlib being implemented in Python, but
doing that in a basic module such as os (or rather posix) is likely to
cause more problems than what we have in other similar situation.  For
example, strptime is implemented in a Python module loaded by time and
datetime implemented in C.  This works, but at a cost of extreme
trickery in the test suit and similar problems encountered by
sophisticated applications.  As far as I remember, some multi-threding
issues have never been resolved.