TickDuration deprecation
Jon Degenhardt
jond at noreply.com
Sat Nov 18 22:46:20 UTC 2017
On Saturday, 18 November 2017 at 16:17:00 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
> On Saturday, November 18, 2017 15:03:05 Timon Gehr via
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> Printing out a floating point value for something like the
> number of seconds can make sense, but using floating point to
> do math with time really doesn't. And it's trivial enough to do
> the math yourself to get the number of seconds (or milliseconds
> or minutes or whatever) as a floating point value if you really
> want that that I'd much rather not add it to core.time, because
> that would just be encouraging folks to start using floating
> point values for something other than simply printing out the
> value, which will lead to buggy code which could have easily
> been avoided just by sticking to integral math.
>
When I use timers to measure time durations, whether for program
performance or something else, at the end I usually want to
convert to units of time appropriate for what is being measured
and print it in a format easily consumable by human readers. That
typically means some fixed precision floating point format.
I admittedly don't understand the argument that it should be hard
to user programs to convert time durations to alternate standard
units of measure. But even so, it would seem to make sense for
the documentation of std.datetime.stopwatch to provide clear
examples of printing a duration in different standard time units.
In documentation's current form, it takes quite a bit of digging
to figure out how to do this. I'd recommend at least making it
clear in the documentation how to do this. Yes, this would also
make it easier for users to convert to float, but printing in
standard units of measure is a rather basic operation.
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