Cameron Simpson wrote:
A monotonic clock never returns t0 > t1 for t0, t1 being two adjacent polls of the clock. On its own it says nothing about steadiness or correlation with real world time.
No, no, no. This is the strict mathematical meaning of the word "monotonic", but the way it's used in relation to OS clocks, it seems to mean rather more than that. A clock whose only guarantee is that it never goes backwards is next to useless. For things like benchmarks and timeouts, the important thing about a clock that it *keeps going forward* at a reasonably constant rate. On the other hand, it can have an arbitrary starting point and doesn't have to be related to any external time standard. I'm assuming this is what Linux et al mean when they talk about a "monotonic clock", because anything else doesn't make sense. So if we're going to use the term "monotonic" at all, I think we should explicitly define it as having this meaning, i.e. both mathematically monotonic and steady. Failure to be clear about this has caused a huge amount of confusion in this thead so far. -- Greg _______________________________________________ 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
