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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Wed Apr 4 17:33:21 CEST 2012

On Wed, 4 Apr 2012 17:30:26 +0200 Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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. "hopefullymonotonic()" doesn't really cut it for me. :-)

monotonic(fallback=False) doesn't look horrible to me (assuming a default value of False for the fallback parameter).

I also don't see how it's hard to guarantee that monotonic() is monotonic.

I think we are speaking about a system-wide monotonic clock (i.e., you can compare values between processes). Otherwise it's probably quite easy indeed.

Regards

Antoine.

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