[Python-Dev] (time) PEP 418 glossary V2 (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Apr 25 05:08:39 CEST 2012

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:19 AM, Jim Jewett <jimjjewett at gmail.com> wrote:

I'm still a little fuzzy on why it shouldn't count as a monotonic clock.

So are the people who say it shouldn't count (unless you're speaking of the specific implementation on Unix systems, which can go backward if the admin or NTP decides it should be so). I think they are in general mistaking their use case for a general specification, that's all. Even Glyph cited "what other people seem to think" in supporting the usage where "monotonic" implies "high quality" in some informal sense, although he does have a spec for what high quality means, and AIUI an API for it in Twisted.

I think we should just accept that "monotonic" is in more or less common use as a synonym for "high quality", and warn our users that the implementers of such clocks may be working to a different spec. I think the revised glossary's description of "monotonic" does that pretty well.

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