On Tue, Jan 30, 2001 at 04:13:39AM -0500, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> Is there any really good reason why sleep() doesn't work for
> microseconds? I mean, if I can do this:
>
> sub sleep {
> my($time) = shift;
> if( /^[+-]?\d+$/ ) {
> sleep($time);
> }
> else {
> select(undef, undef, undef, $time);
> }
> }
>
> Why can't Perl? Smells like a C holdover to me.
I guess it's part of the can of sub-second worms: if we do sleep(),
people will ask why don't we do time() and alarm(), too. sleep() and
alarm() we could get away with more easily, but changing time() to do
subsecond granularity would be A Bad Thing for backward compatibility.
Think of generated filenames, or various logs with timestamps. We can
(hopefully) do a magical p52p6 translator, but fixing the existing
data is a tad harder.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
