Python Programming On Win32

Back to Python

Our design goal is a general-purpose toolkit that allows you to formulate and solve financial problems in Python. To create the toolkit, we will build classes to represent common financial objects. All the code is available for downloading, so we show only selected excerpts; we do, however, list the main functions our class library makes available, for use in later chapters.

First of all, let’s look at a few utilities. If you are fluent in Python, the code will be straightforward and not particularly interesting; but please skim through it anyway to grasp the business logic. If you are new to Python, this chapter should help consolidate your understanding of the language.

Dates and times

Python uses the Unix time system, which measures seconds since midnight on January 1, 1970 (which is when urban legend says the first Unix system booted up). The latest time possible in the system is sometime on January 19, 2038. We don’t want to be tied to this system forever and will therefore express input and output in calendar units, hiding the actual implementation. The dates.py module defines a few helper constants and functions.

EARLY is defined as the earliest date possible on your system or at least earlier than any transactions you will enter. LATE is an arbitrary date later than any transaction you will enter. The functions asc2sec(aDateString ) and sec2asc (aTime) convert between a string representation such as 31-Dec-1998 and seconds. Be aware that the Python time