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Windows also has this albeit course grained and also 32 bit. I don't think ticks reflects the reason why using the timer is desirable.

monotonic\_time seems reasonable, there's no reason to persist short names when users can import it how they like.

On Mar 16, 2012 7:20 AM, "Steven D&apos;Aprano" <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Terry Reedy wrote:
On 3/15/2012 5:27 PM, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Matt Joiner<anacrolix@gmail.com> wrote:
+1\. I now prefer time.monotonic(), no flags.

Am I alone thinking that an adjective is an odd choice for a function
name?

I would normally agree, but in this case, it is a function of a module whose short name names what the adjective is modifying. I expect that this will normally be called with the module name.

I think monotonic\_clock or monotonic\_time would be a better option.

time.monotonic\_time seems redundant.

Agreed. Same applies to "steady\_time", and "steady" on its own is weird. Steady what?

While we're bike-shedding, I'll toss in another alternative. Early Apple Macintoshes had a system function that returned the time since last reboot measured in 1/60th of a second, called "the ticks".

If I have understood correctly, the monotonic timer will have similar properties: guaranteed monotonic, as accurate as the hardware can provide, but not directly translatable to real (wall-clock) time. (Wall clocks sometimes go backwards.)

The two functions are not quite identical: Mac "ticks" were 32-bit integers, not floating point numbers. But the use-cases seem to be the same.

time.ticks() seems right as a name to me. It suggests a steady heartbeat ticking along, without making any suggestion that it returns "the time".



\--
Steven

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