Vincenzo Ampolo wrote:
> 
> Vincenzo Ampolo <vincenzo.ampolo@gmail.com> added the comment:
> 
> This is a real use case I'm working with that needs nanosecond precision
> and lead me in submitting this request:
> 
> most OSes let users capture network packets (using tools like tcpdump or
> wireshark) and store them using file formats like pcap or pcap-ng. These
> formats include a timestamp for each of the captured packets, and this
> timestamp usually has nanosecond precision. The reason is that on
> gigabit and 10 gigabit networks the frame rate is so high that
> microsecond precision is not enough to tell two frames apart.
> pcap (and now pcap-ng) are extremely popular file formats, with millions
> of files stored around the world. Support for nanoseconds in datetime
> would make it possible to properly parse these files inside python to
> compute precise statistics, for example network delays or round trip times.
> 
> Other case is in stock markets. In that field information is timed in
> nanoseconds and have the ability to easily deal with this kind of
> representation natively with datetime can make the standard module even
> more powerful.
> 
> The company I work for is in the data networking field, and we use
> python extensively. Currently we rely on custom code to process
> timestamps, a nanosecond datetime would let us avoit that and use
> standard python datetime module.

Thanks for the two use cases.

You might want to look at mxDateTime and use that for your timestamps.
It does provide full C double precision for the time part of a timestamp,
which covers nanoseconds just fine.