Implementation of a Date/Time type for the NumPy Module

by Marty Fuhry for Python Software Foundation

Dates and times are an integral part of scientific computing. As the fundamental scientific computing package for Python, NumPy needs to handle dates and times. I propose to implement datetime types by creating two datetime types for both absolute dates and relative dates. Both types will be compatible with each other and the existing Python datetime. The existing scikits.timeseries module contains a similar implementation which I will analyze and articulate for numerical purposes.