On Oct 11, 2012, at 2:58 PM, Benjamin Root wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk>
> wrote:
> On 11/10/2012 10:55, Damon McDougall wrote:
>
> > Am I missing something here? Are seconds just floats internally? A
> > delta of 1e-6 is nothing (pardon the pun). A delta of 1e-9 is the
> > *least* I'd expect. Maybe even 1e-12. Perhaps the python interpreter
> > doesn't do any
> > denormalising<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9314534/why-does-changing-0-1f-to-0-slow-down-performance-by-10x>
> > when encountered with deltas very close to zero...
> >
>
> What percentage of computer users wants a delta of 1e-12? I suspect
> that the vast majority of users couldn't care two hoots about miniscule
>
>
> Preach on, my brother! Preach on!
>
> [psst -- you are facing the choir...]
I'm a little confused by this attitude. I recognize that there are issues
around dates, I've written a few date libraries myself to get around insane
excel date issues (pop quiz for anyone at MS, was 1900 a leap year?) or just to
simplify APIs for my own use. But do neither of you think that nanoseconds are
important to scientists? I know of enough projects that work with pico (and a
few with femto) seconds. Even though I often work with climate data covering
~100s of years and used to work with geologic data covering ~billions of years,
I may start working with raw laser data for distance measurements where
nanoseconds can be a pretty big deal. These data would be collected over a few
years time, so a date utility that can handle that scale range would be useful.
I guess I'll be writing my own date/time library again and hacking together
some way of plotting data in a meaningful way in matplotlib.
Don't get me wrong, matplotlib shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel here, but
claiming that nobody could possibly care about 1e-12 seconds seems a little
provincial. My apologies if that is not how the above statements were
intended.
regards,
Ethan
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