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

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Wed Mar 14 18:42:41 CET 2012

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 10:16, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

That's a rather awful name.  time.time() is the real time.

time.monotonic(fallback=False) would be a better API.

I think calling the function "monotonic" isn't really a good name if it's not always monotonic.

time.monotonic(fallback=False)

Really just means

time.monotonic(monotonic=False)

And

time.monotonic(strict=True)

Really means

time.monotonic(i_really_mean_it=True)

This is potentially confusing. Therefore

time.clock() time.time() time.realtime() time.wallclock()

Are all better options if there is a flag to switch if it's monotonic or not.

Since time.clock() apparently can mean different things on different platforms because of it's use of the C-API, we can't use that. I'm not sure why time.time() would differ from time.realtime(). time.time() is per definition not monotonic, but

time.time(monotonic=True)

is maybe a possibility?

//Lennart //Lennart

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