Simon Peyton-Jones (Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 10:06:40AM -0000):
| the haskell 98 time library is horribly broken, if you are using ghc, | you can deconstruct the time constructor which has an Integer containing | the number of seconds since epoch... otherwise you can use | ... | I dont supose this could be considered a typo in the haskell 98 report? | it is an embarasing thing for a language to not be able to do...
Meanwhile, I suspect there's an opportunity for someone (or a small group) to suggest a new Time library that really does the business, and provide an implementation. If it's sufficiently persuasive, all the implementations will adopt it and it can become a de-facto standard.
A sound base for a Time implementation should use TAI (temps atomique international), c.f. <http://cr.yp.to/libtai.html>.
The implementation is important because Time is a weird enough thing that only an expert can implement the spec!
-- Stefan Karrmann