On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 10:30 +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
These can all be done easily if you use UTCTime for epoch time.
[ good examples snipped ]
This discussion raises a good point, I think: the library is carefully designed, but perhaps lacks something in accessibility. Many of the questions that John raised occurred to me when I browsed the docs, in general it isn't obvious how to do the easy things. You demonstrated that the easy things are in fact easy to do, so it's just a problem of presentation.
That can be addressed in two ways:
- change names to be more friendly. If UTCTime is going to be the "linear" time scale that everyone uses to do simple calculations, then we should call it something like ClockTime or Epoch (better suggestions welcome), noting in the documentation that it is UTC. It should be the first thing that you find when you browse the docs, too.
I think UTCTime is the right name as it conveys exactly what it is. I suggest to keep it and to mention in the docs that this is the time type one normally uses. Introducing a new, less meaningful name is the wrong direction, IMHO. Axel.