I suspect this has been asked before, I apologize if that is the case. Why did we decide to not allow for Dates.Second(1.5)? 1.5Unitful.s works fine for instance…

It’s perfectly valid to think of a date as a position or angle, as it’s ultimately intended to be a measure of the Earth’s motion about the sun. The time of day is a measure of the rotation of the Earth. One can think of both as having the same units as angles (in fact, that’s literally where the un…

Oh no. That’s such an unfortunate choice. If they’d used the UNIX epoch it would have exactly the precision/range tradeoff you actually want.

Obviously Dates is a mess. What ever the bike shedding is, and it is, can we put someone on it? time representation seems crucial for a v1.0, does it not?

[image] yakir12: can we put someone on it? It will probably be done by someone who needs this behavior. Since you raised the issue, you could try submitting a PR.

[image] yakir12: I have to admit that I can appreciate the accuracy we have thanks to the integer based time in Julia. What makes you think that using Float64 would be less accurate? Floating-point computations with integers < 2^53 are exact.

This blog post by Bruce Dawson (actually mentioned in the Julia manual!) is an interesting in-depth analysis of the related issues. TL;DR: Elapsed game time should never be stored in a float. Use a double instead. so a Float64 (what C calls a double) should be OK.

0.3 years in nanosecond > 2^53 nanoseconds

[image] morningkyle: 0.3 years in nanosecond > 2^53 nanoseconds Two points: 300 years in nanoseconds > 2^63 nanoseconds. If you are measuring years in nanoseconds, pretty soon you are going to overflow Int64 too. If you are measuring years in nanoseconds, I’m willing to bet that you d…

Blockquote If you are measuring years in nanoseconds That’s not my point, although nanosecond is usually the minimal time unit in designs. In my previous post, I said usually multiple integers(Int64) have be used with different scale of time units in the design. If DateTime API is designed wit…

No one is advocating a single Float64 time unit. The question is, why can’t the current design (multiple time units) wrap Float64 values instead of Int64? Float64 seems a lot more flexible, with no apparent loss in accuracy.

Why do time quantities have to be integers?

Internals & Design

Topic		Replies	Views
`DateTime` arithmetic on `Microsecond` (or smaller) scale Internals & Design dates , datetime	99	4576	August 26, 2023
TimesDates.jl dev for v2 Specific Domains dates , time , internals	44	2722	September 14, 2023
Higher resolution DateTime/TimeStamp Internals & Design dates	44	10718	February 13, 2019
[ANN] TimeFloats.jl: Converting time to floats and vice versa Package Announcements dates	0	174	March 5, 2026
Convert Date difference to Float64 New to Julia dates	8	1236	April 6, 2022

Why do time quantities have to be integers?

Related topics