On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 12:13 PM, STINNER Victor <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
..
> Hum, it's maybe not possible to choose between integer and float. Why
> not supporting both? Example:
>  - totimestamp()->int: truncate microseconds
>  - totimestamp(microseconds=True)->float: with microseconds

I would still prefer totimestamp()->(int, int) returning (sec, usec)
tuple.  The important benefit is that such totimestamp() will not
loose information and will support more formats than either of your
->int or ->float variants.  The ->int can then be spelt simply as
totimestamp()[0] and on systems with numpy (which is likely for users
that deal with floats a lot), totimestamp(microseconds=True) is simply
dot([1, 1e-6], totimestamp()). (and s,us = totimestamp(); return s +
us * 1e-6 is not that hard either.)