BUG: provide better error message for pd.Timedelta - pd.Series[Timestamp]

[sfc-gh-mvashishtha]

Pandas version checks

• I have checked that this issue has not already been reported.

• I have confirmed this bug exists on the latest version of pandas.

• I have confirmed this bug exists on the main branch of pandas.

Reproducible Example

import pandas as pd

pd.Timedelta(10) - pd.Series([pd.Timestamp(1)])

Issue Description

You can do the same subtraction with integers (1 - pd.Series(10)), and you can also do pd.Timedelta + pd.Series[Timestamp] (pd.Timedelta(10) + pd.Series([pd.Timestamp(1)])), so pandas should be consistent and allow pd.Timedelta - pd.Series[Timestamp]

#25497 is an older, closed issue about the error message here, but this scenario shouldn't cause an error at all.

Expected Behavior

Should subtract the scalar from each element of the series/dataframe/index

Installed Versions

INSTALLED VERSIONS
------------------
commit                : d9cdd2ee5a58015ef6f4d15c7226110c9aab8140
python                : 3.9.18.final.0
python-bits           : 64
OS                    : Darwin
OS-release            : 23.6.0
Version               : Darwin Kernel Version 23.6.0: Mon Jul 29 21:13:04 PDT 2024; root:xnu-10063.141.2~1/RELEASE_ARM64_T6020
machine               : arm64
processor             : arm
byteorder             : little
LC_ALL                : None
LANG                  : en_US.UTF-8
LOCALE                : en_US.UTF-8

pandas                : 2.2.2
numpy                 : 1.26.3
pytz                  : 2023.3.post1
dateutil              : 2.8.2
setuptools            : 68.2.2
pip                   : 23.3.1
Cython                : None
pytest                : None
hypothesis            : None
sphinx                : None
blosc                 : None
feather               : None
xlsxwriter            : None
lxml.etree            : None
html5lib              : None
pymysql               : None
psycopg2              : None
jinja2                : None
IPython               : 8.18.1
pandas_datareader     : None
adbc-driver-postgresql: None
adbc-driver-sqlite    : None
bs4                   : None
bottleneck            : None
dataframe-api-compat  : None
fastparquet           : None
fsspec                : None
gcsfs                 : None
matplotlib            : None
numba                 : None
numexpr               : None
odfpy                 : None
openpyxl              : None
pandas_gbq            : None
pyarrow               : None
pyreadstat            : None
python-calamine       : None
pyxlsb                : None
s3fs                  : None
scipy                 : None
sqlalchemy            : None
tables                : None
tabulate              : None
xarray                : None
xlrd                  : None
zstandard             : None
tzdata                : 2023.4
qtpy                  : None
pyqt5                 : None

[mroeschke]

Addition with these types is a communicate operation, but subtraction is not and is undefined even with analogous scalars from the standard library

In [1]: import datetime

In [2]: datetime.timedelta(1) - datetime.datetime.now()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[2], line 1
----> 1 datetime.timedelta(1) - datetime.datetime.now()

TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'datetime.timedelta' and 'datetime.datetime'

In [3]: import pandas as pd

In [4]: pd.Timedelta(1) - pd.Timestamp.now()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[4], line 1
----> 1 pd.Timedelta(1) - pd.Timestamp.now()

TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'Timedelta' and 'Timestamp'

[sfc-gh-mvashishtha]

@mroeschke yes, now that I think about it, this operation doesn't make sense in pandas either. However, the error message bad operand type for unary - is opaque. Can we change the error message so it looks more like the scalar Timedelta - Timestamp ones, i.e. so it includes unsupported operand type(s) for -?

[jorisvandenbossche]

Agreed that it would be nice to have a clearer error message (renamed/relabeled the issue as such)

[KevsterAmp]

Take

[AshmitGupta]

@KevsterAmp Still working on this issue or can I assign it to myself?

[KevsterAmp]

You can assign it to yourself. @AshmitGupta

[KevsterAmp]

Will be going to continue to work on this

[KevsterAmp]

take

[KevsterAmp]

take

[KevsterAmp]

take