Date.prototype.getTime

[P T Withington]

On 2006-06-28, at 12:16 EDT, Peter Hall wrote:

> // this flag can't go in the Date constructor because it is already
> overloaded enough...
> Date.useNanoseconds = true;
> var dt = new Date();
> nanoseconds = dt.getTime()*1000 + dt.getNanoseconds();

On 2006-06-28, at 12:12 EDT, Brendan Eich wrote:
> * A year from the epoch in nanoseconds requires more mantissa bits  
> than are in IEEE754 double. Return a pair [seconds, nanoseconds]  
> from a Date.nanotime() static method.

It seems contradictory to have access to a finer-grained clock be  
more expensive.  Since its purpose is accuracy, you don't want to  
require allocation (and possibly a garbage-collection) to use it.  It  
is unlikely that you need the range of Date if you are concerned with  
precision.  Maybe the answer is to leave Date.prototype.getTime alone  
and create a new interface with less range and more precision:

Date.tick:  getter returning an integer that increases linearly with  
elapsed time and is guaranteed to increase by at least 1 when  
accessed successively.  (I.e., can be used to measure the elapsed  
time of a trivial expression.)

Date.tickScale:  float that is the ratio of Date.tick units to  
nanoseconds.