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pep proposal : A date object for the standard library

Andrew Dalke dalke at dalkescientific.com
Sat Dec 8 02:03:40 EST 2001 
Chris Barker wrote:
>That sounds to me like a really good reason why we don't have to worry
>about femtoseconds. Resolving time down to units that small is simply
>incompatable with calender dates.

"I started my molecular simulation at 13:28 using a timestep
 site of 0.75 femtoseconds."

But in truth, when I did molecular modelling we used two
units of time.  One was standard unix time, for when the
program started and stopped, and the other was simulation
time, which was a floating point number of femtoseconds.
We didn't try to use the same time system for both numbers,
since that would be silly generalization.

Still, perhaps someday it wouldn't be silly, like when
we're using 128 bit machines, so we could keep track of
the number of zeptoseconds (10**-21 sec) since the start
of the Universe.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com
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