[AdamN]

What about precision? There is the Date object with day-precision and the Datetime object with microsecond precision ... but nothing else. There's no canonical way in Python with any library that I know of to say "July, 2013" or even "12:15pm". The former will simply put in July 1st and the latter will put in seconds and microseconds implying precision that doesn't exist.

Anybody know of an elegant solution/library or even a library that would be open to including such a concept?

[epistemenical]

numpy does this, with np.datetime64('2013-07') or np.datetime64('2013-07-01 12:15'). I wouldn't recommend using it if you're not otherwise using numpy, though.