On Friday, October 12, 2012, Ethan Gutmann wrote:
>
> 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<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> '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
>
Oh, don't get me wrong, those time scales are important. I was merely
expressing my dismay over the amount of problems that exists in the set of
tools for everyday use. It is 2012, and Perl still has probably the best
datetime library out there...
Python can do much better.
Ben Root
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