[Python-ideas] millisecond and microsecond times without floats

Paul Sokolovsky pmiscml at gmail.com
Tue Jun 23 22:25:00 CEST 2015


Hello,

On Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:03:14 +0000
"Gregory P. Smith" <greg at krypto.org> wrote:

[]

> > sleep_ms()
> > sleep_us()
> > monotonic_ms()
> > monotonic_us()
> >
> 
> If you're going to add new function names, going with the _unit suffix
> seems best.
> 
> Another option to consider: keyword only arguments.
> 
> time.sleep(ms=31416)
> time.sleep(us=31415927)
> time.sleep(ns=31415296536)

That doesn't immediately map to usage for monotonic(), as you mention
below.

Another issue is that keywords arguments on average (and for
MicroPython all the time) are less efficient than positional. Put it
other way,

t = monotonic_ns()
t = monotonic_ns() - t

is going to give lower number than

t = monotonic(ns=True)
t = monotonic(ns=True) - t

, and the closer it to 0, the better.

> # We could use the long form names milliseconds, microseconds and
> nanoseconds but i worry with those that people would inevitably
> confuse ms with microseconds as times and APIs usually given the
> standard abbreviations rather than spelled out.

Another issue is that full spellings are rather long. Logistically,
while function names can be expected to have autocompletion support,
keyword arguments not necessarily.

> time.monotonic(return_int_ns=True) ?
> # This seems ugly.  time.monotonic_ns() seems better.
> 
> These should be acceptable to add to Python 3.6 for consistency.

Well, as I mentioned, I'm personally not looking for this to be
implemented in CPython right away. Ideally, this should be tested by >1
independent "embedded" Python implementation first, and only then, based
on the actual experience, submitted as a PEP. That's rather better than
"desktop" CPython, which doesn't care about all the subtle "embedded"
aspects "forced" a way to implement it.

> I do not think we should have functions for each ms/us/ns unit if
> adding functions.  Just choose the most useful high precision unit
> and let people do the math as needed for the others.

Well, that's one of examples of that "desktop" thinking ;-).
Consider for example that 2^32 microseconds is just over an hour, so
expressing everything in microseconds would require arbitrary-precision
integers, which may be just the same kind of burden for an embedded
system as floats.

> > Point 3 above isn't currently addressed by time module at all.
> > https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0418/ mentions some internal

[]

> Reading the PEP my takeaway is that wrap-around of underlying
> deficient system APIs should be handled by the Python VM for the
> user. It sounds like we should explicitly spell this out though.

This is another point which is overlooked by "desktop" programmers -
time counters can, will, and do wrap around. Big OSes try hard to to
hide this fact, and indeed succeed well enough, so in cases when they
do fail, it has shattering effect (at least PR-wise) - Y2K, Y2K38
problems. For an embedded programmer wrapping counters is objective
reality, and we wouldn't like to hide that fact in MicroPython
(of course, only for these, newly introduced real-time precision time
functions).

> I don't think time.elapsed() could ever provide any utility in either
> case, just use subtraction. 

Can't work. Previous value of monotonic_us() is 65530, next value is
10, what does it tell you?

> time.elapsed() wouldn't know when and
> where the time values came from and magically be able to apply wrap
> around or not to them.

Well, as I mentioned, it's an API contract that elapsed() takes values
of monotonic_ms(), monotonic_us(), etc. functions, and knows law how
their values change (likely, apply unsigned power-of-2 modular
arithmetics). There's additional restriction that this change law for
all of monotonic_ms(), monotonic_us() is the same, but I personally
find this an acceptable restriction to not bloat API even further. (But
it is a restriction, for example, if nano/microsecond time source is
24-bit counter, than millisecond time is limited to 24 bits too).

> 
> -gps
> 


-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                          mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com


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