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

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Wed Apr 4 17:30:26 CEST 2012

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 23:14, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:

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.

I disagree with this, mainly for the reason that there isn't any good names for these functions. "hopefully_monotonic()" doesn't really cut it for me. :-) I also don't see how it's hard to guarantee that monotonic() is monotonic.

//Lennart

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