[Python-Dev] time.clock() on windows

[Scott Dial]

Curt Hagenlocher wrote:
> But it makes more sense to
> understand why someone chose to implement time.clock() on Windows the
> way they did -- this seems very broken to me, and I think it should be
> changed.

Some SVN detective work takes this to all the way back to r7713
(1997-04-02). The original implementation checked by Guido and
attributed to Mark Hammond. So, we should ask Mark why he did that.

Can anyone honestly use it, as it is, without already having normalize
it across platforms themselves?

I don't know how much of an impact it is, but the current implementation
of clock() does not require argument parsing, so the proposal to add a
"absolute" boolean-flag argument is perhaps bad. This is generally a
function used for performance timing and that proposal adds some amount
of latency to the query. The proposal to add a clockbase() function is
perhaps better because of this, you need only call it once, and you can
cache the result for the life of your process.

-- 
Scott Dial
scott at scottdial.com
scodial at cs.indiana.edu