Concerning Time.TimeDiff

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| Following a brief off-list exchange, Simon Marlow suggested I post
some
| notes here concerning Time.diffClockTimes and Time.TimeDiff.  These
arise
| from my thought that the current behaviour of the GHC library in
| (sometimes) returning a value with positive seconds and negative
| picoseconds values might be viewed as perverse.  I'm trying to go
beyond a
| "what is technically correct" viewpoint to "what is useful"...
|=20
| I understand there's some history here, of which I'm not properly
aware, so
| if this is merely rehashing old ground, please ignore.

The H98 Time module is probably broken in many ways.

Rather than try to fix it incrementally, I think it'd be most productive
if the interested parties simply got together and agreed an interface
for a new Time module, even if it's incompatible with the old one.
Perhaps Graham is The Man!

Simon