Type for Current Time Function

Ashley Yakeley ashley at semantic.org
Fri Feb 4 06:37:45 EST 2005


The most basic or at least the most obvious function in a time library 
is one that gets the current time. What is its return type?

  getCurrentTime :: IO ???

There seems to be consensus that it should be some kind of encoding of 
UTC rather than TAI. If you don't mind the hiccups, POSIX time is the 
simplest way to (mostly) encode UTC. The simplest _correct_ way is a 
(days,ticks) pair. A third alternative would be broken-down Calendar 
time, with year, month, day etc.

What's the best choice for getCurrentTime?

-- 
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA



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