[Haskell-cafe] Re: A few ideas about FRP and arbitrary access in time

On Mar 7, 1:01 am, Peter Verswyvelen wrote:

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 8:45 PM, sinelaw wrote:

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But isn't Lucid Synchrone essentially discrete-timed? Also, events

Maybe reality itself can also be modeled using  discrete timesteps? If so, then a discrete clock calculus might make a lot of sense.  I don't know much about theoretical physics - I think general relativity still is the "best" model for time, and it's continuous in that model - but maybe the people with a PhD in physics know more about it :-)

I don't think a deep knowledge of physics is what we lack here, at least for the question of continuous vs. discrete time. Maybe the best physical model for nature really does involve discrete time steps. However, for our everyday experiences (and maybe for anything that's not on a the tiny quantum scale?) continuous time is the most natural model to follow. And when modeling changing values such as mouse position (the perpetual example...), animations, sound, etc. continuous time seems much more natural. Don't forget to check out the link Conal posted, his short blog post about the subject: http://conal.net/blog/posts/why-program-with-continuous-time/