On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 4:57 PM, Victor Stinner <victor.stin...@gmail.com> wrote: > I added two functions to the time module in Python 3.3: wallclock() > and monotonic(). I'm unable to explain the difference between these > two functions, even if I wrote them :-) wallclock() is suppose to be > more accurate than time() but has an unspecified starting point. > monotonic() is similar except that it is monotonic: it cannot go > backward. monotonic() may not be available or fail whereas wallclock() > is available/work, but I think that the two functions are redundant. > > I prefer to keep only monotonic() because it is not affected by system > clock update and should help to fix issues on NTP update in functions > implementing a timeout. > > What do you think?
I think wallclock() is an awkward name; in other contexts I've seen "wall clock time" used to mean the time that a clock on the wall would show, i.e. local time. This matches definition #1 of http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wall-time.html (while yours matches #2 :-). I agree that it's better to have only one of these. I also think if we offer it we should always have it -- if none of the implementations are available, I guess you could fall back on returning time.time(), with some suitable offset so people don't think it is always the same. Maybe it could be called realtime()? -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
