SET DATESTYLE to time_t style for client libraries?

So I discovered today that pgdb follows in the traditional style of
carrying timestamp and most other time fields through to the user as
text strings, so I either need to have all my queries do some gymnastics
to have the server format my time information in a way that is printable
or can be handled by my client code or whatever.

Is there a better way?  I was thinking that if there was a way to set a
datestyle that would just emit the seconds since the Unix epoch, I could
kick them into the python time module's functions for easier formatting,
and it would give all clients a more standardized way to deal with time
by letting them get the 'raw' values and handle them locally.

Is this a good, bad, or old idea?  Should I spend some time trying to
patch my local system for testing?

-- 
Adam Haberlach      | Who buys an eight-processor machine and then watches 30
adam@newsnipple.com | movies on it all at the same time?  Beats me.  They told                   | us they could sell
it,so we made it.                   |        -- George Hoffman, Be Engineer