[Python-Dev] Drop the new time.wallclock() function? (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Fri Mar 16 00🔞44 CET 2012

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 at 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 monotonicclock or monotonictime would be a better option. time.monotonictime 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

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list