Re: [Matplotlib-users] Format date tick labels

[Ethan G. <eth...@gm...>]

On Oct 11, 2012, at 2:58 PM, Benjamin Root wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Mark Lawrence <bre...@ya...> wrote:
> On 11/10/2012 10:55, Damon McDougall wrote:
> 
> > Am I missing something here? Are seconds just floats internally? A
> > delta of 1e-6 is nothing (pardon the pun). A delta of 1e-9 is the
> > *least* I'd expect. Maybe even 1e-12. Perhaps the python interpreter
> > doesn't do any denormalising<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9314534/why-does-changing-0-1f-to-0-slow-down-performance-by-10x>
> > when encountered with deltas very close to zero...
> >
> 
> What percentage of computer users wants a delta of 1e-12?  I suspect
> that the vast majority of users couldn't care two hoots about miniscule
> 
> 
> Preach on, my brother! Preach on!
> 
> [psst -- you are facing the choir...]


I'm a little confused by this attitude.  I recognize that there are issues around dates, I've written a few date libraries myself to get around insane excel date issues (pop quiz for anyone at MS, was 1900 a leap year?) or just to simplify APIs for my own use.  But do neither of you think that nanoseconds are important to scientists?  I know of enough projects that work with pico (and a few with femto) seconds.  Even though I often work with climate data covering ~100s of years and used to work with geologic data covering ~billions of years, I may start working with raw laser data for distance measurements where nanoseconds can be a pretty big deal.  These data would be collected over a few years time, so a date utility that can handle that scale range would be useful.  I guess I'll be writing my own date/time library again and hacking together some way of plotting data in a meaningful way in matplotlib.  

Don't get me wrong, matplotlib shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel here, but claiming that nobody could possibly care about 1e-12 seconds seems a little provincial.  My apologies if that is not how the above statements were intended.  

regards,
Ethan