time since the epoch

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| 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
|=20
...
| 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...

Alas, no.  CUP is, even as I type, printing the Haskell 98 Report.

We'll have to think about how to accumulate further bugs/suggestions for
H98.

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.
The implementation is important because Time is a weird enough thing
that only an expert can implement the spec! =20

I think the current Time library suffered because no one who Really
Cared about time was involved in its design or implementation.

Simon