time since the epoch

[Stefan Karrmann]

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