astropy/astropy — pull request #332 by taldcroft (2012-07-31 14:12:45+00:00)
Title: Time candidate for merge

This represents a candidate for merging and supercedes PR #294. New features since the last commit 0abdeb7 on the time branch there:

- Much improved [documentation](http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~aldcroft/tmp/astropy/html/time/index.html), now written in the package template standard.
- Get rid of the "opt" mechanism for setting options and replace with attributes (1016f97).
- Make the time scale and format attributes appear in IPython tab-completion (9214ef8)
- Some refactoring to improve code clarity.
- Change `set/get_delta_*` methods into property attributes (f131694)
- Rename astropy/time/astrotime.py to astropy/time/core.py.
- Rebase from astropy/master (09eafa7), hence the new PR.

Of particular note for the API is that the proposed standard for users will be:
```python
>>> from astropy.time import Time, TimeDelta
```
This provides all "user" functionality for the time package. I think this is clean and looks nice. Developers wishing to write derived classes etc will do:
```python
>>> import astropy.time as atime
```

Still to do prior to merge:

- Improve test suite
- Capture many of the good implementation ideas in the PR #294 discussion as issues.
- Capture some other unexpected / undesired behavior I've noticed as issues. (None of these affect the documented API).