[Python-Dev] PEP 418: rename time.monotonic() to time.steady()? (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Tue Apr 3 23:14:15 CEST 2012

Wait, what? I already thought we, several days ago, decided that "steady" was a terrible name, and that monotonic should not fall back to the system clock.

Copy of a more recent Guido's email: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-March/118322.html "Anyway, the more I think about it, the more I believe these functions should have very loose guarantees, and instead just cater to common use cases -- availability of a timer with minimal fuss is usually more important than the guarantees. So forget the idea about one version that falls back to time.time() and another that doesn't -- just always fall back to time.time(), which is (almost) always better than failing.

Then we can design a separate inquiry API (doesn't have to be complex as long as it's extensible -- a dict or object with a few predefined keys or attributes sounds good enough) for apps that want to know more about how the timer they're using is actually implemented."

I added time.get_clock_info() so the user can check if the clock is monotonic or not.

Victor

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