René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"float128s everywhere for dates?","articleBody":"The bad roundings that appear in #7138 (loss of microsecond precision for dates around today) make me wonder whether we should just switch to using float128s everywhere for date-related data.\n\nTime is encoded as seconds since 0001-01-01 UTC, so float64s (53 bits) can keep microsecond precision for a timedelta up to 2**53 / 1e6 / 3.154e7 ~ 285 years (3.154e7s/y), which does not go up to today.  On the other hand float128s offer 113 bits of precision, i.e. ~3e20 years -- that should be safe, even if we switch to nanosecond precision :-)\n\nOn the other hand I don't actually ever use dates in plots so I don't know if it's really worth it.\n","author":{"url":"https://github.com/anntzer","@type":"Person","name":"anntzer"},"datePublished":"2016-09-19T20:53:32.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":9},"url":"https://github.com/7139/matplotlib/issues/7139"}