=head1 TITLE Higher resolution time values =head1 VERSION Maintainer: Gisle Aas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 2000-08-02 Version: 1 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Number: 7 =head1 ABSTRACT All functions that return time values (seconds since epoch) should use floating point numbers to return as much precision as the platform supports. All functions that take time values as arguments should work for fractional seconds if the platform supports it. =head1 DESCRIPTION Perl5 only support 1 second resolution on time values. In order to get higher resolution timing an external module (Time::HiRes) currently need to be used. This situation ought to be improved in perl6. All functions that return time values (seconds since epoch) should use floating point numbers to return as much precision as the platform supports. This include the following builtin functions: time stat /* atime, mtime and ctime fields */ times /* already float */ All functions that take time values as arguments should work for fractional seconds if the platform supports it. This include the following builtin functions: sleep alarm utime One problem with using doubles to represent time values is that it will not always be able to represent all of the time precision that the platform actually support. For instance time() value with Unix epoch represented with 15 decimal digit float precision will only support around 10 µs resolution for current timestamps. =head1 IMPLEMENTATION Should be straight forward. Configure might need to figure out some more about what hires-timer interfaces are available if it does not already do this. =head1 PERL5 PORTABILITY Calls to time() could be transformed to int(time()) when converting perl5 programs to perl6. =head1 REFERENCES Time::HiRes module on CPAN
