ENH: Series Creation Does Not Intelligently Handle datetime.date

For example:

In [77]: pd.Series([datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 1)]).dtype
Out[77]: dtype('<M8[ns]')

works as expected.

However:

In [78]: pd.Series([datetime.date(2012, 1, 1)]).dtype
Out[78]: dtype('O')

create a Series of type object rather than datetime64.

You can get the desired effect:

In [89]: pd.Series(np.array([np.datetime64(datetime.date(2012, 1, 1))])).dtype
Out[89]: dtype('<M8[D]')

[TomAugspurger]

I don’t think we should auto-convert datetime.date to datetimes. They’re different things. In the future, we (or a 3rd party) may make an ExtensionArray for dates, and we would have to backtrack this change.

If the user wants datetimes now, then they have pd.to_datetime.

[jreback]

@maximilianr

datetime.date could be auto-converted to datetime64[ns] though that would be an API change.

handling datetime.date as an actual dtype, `datetime64[D]``. is possible, though would require a fair bit of work.

It is not on the priority list, though you are welcome to take a look.