time.h design issues

[D. J. Bernstein]

I agree that there are programs that use a low-level tick counter. One
obvious example is the operating system: there's no reasonable way to
implement gettimeofday(), for example, without a low-level tick counter.

I also agree that toasters and other memoryless real-time embedded
systems, being constitutionally incapable of figuring out the current
time, need to use low-level tick counters instead.

However, treating low-level tick counters the same way as timestamps is
a blatant error. Old timestamps have a defined relationship to civil
time; old tick counters do not. Most time functions simply don't make
sense for tick counters. The fact that something is changing over time
doesn't mean that it belongs in a time library!

Furthermore, it is clearly incorrect to claim that tick counters
eliminate the problems of setting clocks backwards. I already gave the
example of the ``make'' program; if you use tick counters here instead
of timestamps, you get disastrous results after a reboot.

---Dan