[Python-Dev] Rename time.steady(strict=True) to time.monotonic()? (original) (raw)

Jeffrey Yasskin jyasskin at gmail.com
Sat Mar 24 06:37:45 CET 2012

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

time.steady(strict=True) looks to be confusing for most people, some of them don't understand the purpose of the flag and others don't like a flag changing the behaviour of the function. I propose to replace time.steady(strict=True) by time.monotonic(). That would avoid the need of an ugly NotImplementedError: if the OS has no monotonic clock, time.monotonic() will just not exist. So we will have: - time.time(): realtime, can be adjusted by the system administrator (manually) or automatically by NTP - time.clock(): monotonic clock on Windows, CPU time on UNIX - time.monotonic(): monotonic clock, its speed may or may not be adjusted by NTP but it only goes forward, may raise an OSError - time.steady(): monotonic clock or the realtime clock, depending on what is available on the platform (use monotonic in priority). may be adjusted by NTP or the system administrator, may go backward.

Please don't use the word "steady" for something different from what C++ means by it. C++'s term means "may not be adjusted at all, even by NTP; proceeds at as close to the rate of real time as the system can manage" (paraphrased). If the consensus in the Python community is that a C++-style "steady" clock is unnecessary, then feel free not to define it. If the consensus is that "monotonic" already means everything C++ means by "steady", that's fine with me too. I mentioned it because I thought it might be worth looking at what other languages were doing in this space, not because I thought it was a nice word that you should attach your own definitions to.

Jeffrey

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