Just thinking loud...

On 05/30/18 19:36, Martin Buchholz wrote:
Obvious progress would seem to be more conversion methods.  Conversion code
tends to be annoying/errorprone because of having to deal with overflow.

Stephen/Doug: is there any reason we didn't add conversions between
Duration and TimeUnit when we added conversions to ChronoUnit?

Here's a strawman:

     /**
      * Converts the given time duration to this unit.
      *
      * @param duration the time duration
      * @return the converted duration in this unit,
      * or {@code Long.MIN_VALUE} if conversion would negatively overflow,
      * or {@code Long.MAX_VALUE} if it would positively overflow.
      */
     public long convert(Duration duration) {
         long s = convert(duration.getSeconds(), SECONDS);
         if (s == Long.MIN_VALUE) return s;
         long n = convert(duration.getNano(), NANOSECONDS);
         assert n >= 0 && n < 1_000_000_000;
         return (s + n < s) ? Long.MAX_VALUE : s + n;
     }

Duration object has a big range (Long.MIN_VALUE ... Long.MAX_VALUE seconds) and a nanosecond precision. Both can not always be expressed as a pair of (TimeUnit, long) which are the usual parameter(s) of some methods. Above API proposal leaves the decision which TimeUnit to choose for conversion to the programmer. Would a pair of methods on Duration that return a TimeUnit and a long make sense here? The Duration could choose TimeUnit so that returned (TimeUnit, long) pair would be as precise as possible and still not overflow (like a floating point)...

Peter

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