[Python-Dev] Drop the new time.wallclock() function?

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 4:57 PM, Victor Stinner
<victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I added two functions to the time module in Python 3.3: wallclock()
> and monotonic(). I'm unable to explain the difference between these
> two functions, even if I wrote them :-) wallclock() is suppose to be
> more accurate than time() but has an unspecified starting point.
> monotonic() is similar except that it is monotonic: it cannot go
> backward. monotonic() may not be available or fail whereas wallclock()
> is available/work, but I think that the two functions are redundant.
>
> I prefer to keep only monotonic() because it is not affected by system
> clock update and should help to fix issues on NTP update in functions
> implementing a timeout.
>
> What do you think?

I think wallclock() is an awkward name; in other contexts I've seen
"wall clock time" used to mean the time that a clock on the wall would
show, i.e. local time. This matches definition #1 of
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wall-time.html (while yours matches
#2 :-).

I agree that it's better to have only one of these. I also think if we
offer it we should always have it -- if none of the implementations
are available, I guess you could fall back on returning time.time(),
with some suitable offset so people don't think it is always the same.
Maybe it could be called realtime()?

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)