Time Resolution

Seth Kurtzberg seth at cql.com
Tue Feb 1 21:18:58 EST 2005


Aaron Denney wrote:

>>I'm afraid you are.  I think we're all aware of the problem of ascribing
>>to much accuracy to a result quoted to high precision.  But truncating
>>the precision to known level of accuracy is merely a rule-of-thumb that
>>usually works well enough.  If you truely need to know error bounds,
>>there's no escape but to manually propogate that error information
>>through.  Setting a maximum precision because some sources for that
>>information aren't that accurate is throwing away the baby with the
>>bathwater,
>
Yes, but I didn't suggest any such thing

>> and if you have imprecise sources from outside the system,
>>you have the same problemi in managing their precision, if it's less
>>than what we demanded for the ClockTime precision.
>
Yes, but as I'm suggesting that the precision be controllable by the 
user (if this is possible without mucking up the default case).  Clearly 
you can't expect the time library to know the precision of every value 
is uses.  In your example (outside sources), only the library's user 
knows the precision.  So let the user control it.



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