Re: [RFC] Duration class

Hi Tim, hey all On 22.06.26 22:31, Tim Düsterhus wrote:

Hi On 6/22/26 17:34, Andreas Heigl wrote:

I just think we do not need a separate "Duration" and later a "Time" class when they both - in essence - hold the same information.

The Internals mailing list is not the correct location to debate philosophical questions. Humans consider Durations and Times to be different concepts. The difference between “meeting is (in/at) 10:00” is the difference between Duration and Time. If you conflate those, you end up being late. Similarly if I call sleep(new Time(0, 10, 0)), I'm expecting the process to sleep until 10 past whatever midnight comes next, not for 10 minutes.

I don't see this as a philosophical question but a question of Naming. To take your example: A meeting is never at 10:00. But at 10:00 on date X at location Y. The 10:00 part is merely one part of a meeting-time. *If* you want philosophical questions (and yes, I believe the internals mailinglist is also the place to tackle these - as uncomfortable as they might be) then I would argue that the "Duration" you have in mind is actually not a duration but merely a ValueObject for SI-Seconds with a nanosecond resolution. After all a duration can also be "5 years". But that is explicitly excluded. Why? After all the second was in 1956 defined as 1/31,556,925.9747th of a year. So from a philosophical point of view: Why should a *duration* only be definable in units that can (more or less relaibly) be converted into seconds? But sleep(new Seconds(12, 123456789)) or sleep(Seconds::fromHours(12,34,45,123456789)) sounds like exactly what one expects. That this Seconds class can then be reused later in an improved DateTime library is only a sidenote. The idea that Time is midnight-based is but a western european assumption based on the gregorian calendaring system. As long as the reference-point isn't defined, a Time is just a collection of hours, minutes and seconds. Similar to a Money object that is just a collection of numbers and units that is in itself totally value-less as long as you don't add a currency. And in both cases the number of units that make up the next level can be different depending on the reference-point. *That* is for me a philosophical question. Anyhow. It's not a hill I'll die upon. It's just my 0.02€ Cheers Andreas

Best regards Tim Düsterhus

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