datetime and the rich-companison operators

[Ethan Furman]

Greetings All!

I am implementing a NullDate class in order to mirror dates and
datetimes that have no value (yes, this is for my dbf module

I'm still a bit fuzzy about class methods, hashing, and __new__, but my
question of the moment is this: it seems to me that with two dates or
datetimes, they should either be equal, or one should precede the other,
and this can be accomplished quite handily with __cmp__... so does
anyone know why the rich comparisons were used in the datetime module?
Was it simply a style choice, or is something being handled that __cmp__
couldn't cope with?

Thanks in advance!
~ethan~