> on the other hand, given Victor's research, I don't see float seconds since an epoch appearing anywhere as a standard.  Where do you see this being used as a standard?

Yes, I didn't mean standard as in RFCed and recommended and dominant, sorry if it sounded that way. I meant just that it is quite common in many places, big and small.

> I also don't understand your complaint about the fact that the one-liner creates a timetuple.  datetime stores the date and time information as discrete fields, so generating a timetuple is a natural conversion path.  

Well, the timetuple is not a tuple, but an object filled with attributes. It contains a few more than are required for this conversion and it doesn't contain one that is required. Therefore I really see that as an inelegant and ineffective way to do the conversion.