<snip>

<<<now /minute>>>; is quite legal and will return a float expressing the amount of minutes the VM has been alive. I see "now" and other times as a duration with the start of the VM as it's start.

So; we can divide "now" by a duration and get a float but a float times a duration will always be a "duration" and not a "time", so far, in practice.

Oh, but that's far weirder! I would not have expected that to be legal. So "now" is a strange animal indeed, having traits of both time and duration...

Actually, it looks like any time type divided by a duration returns a float. hrm... I wouldn't have guessed.

A keyword for this may not be enough. The following is a attempt to create my own "birth" keyword expressing this. I can't get it smaller then this and I would say this is quite perverse in a way;

//strongly typed meets strongly timed :殆
//at least it runs and works....
now - ((now /samp)::samp) => time birth;

I'd say this means casting can make sense but I'm open to ideas.

I still don't like the idea that a time can be cast as a duration-from-vm-start, however, a "birth" keyword makes sense. Consider this:

2::second => now; // is kind of like "for the next two seconds" or "two seconds from now", etc.

if we had some idiom for "since"... like:

since(now, birth) => dur aliveTime; // which you could build...

or:

2::second + birth => time twoSecAfterBirth;

You're right, that would make timing relative to the VM starting up much simpler.

your way is clever:
//strongly typed meets strongly timed :殆
//at least it runs and works....
now - ((now /samp)::samp) => time birth;

But I feel like you shouldn't have to do that. I see how you could easily abstract this using functions, but a keyword for the time that the VM started seems like it would be easier, more global, etc.

at least, this returns a -1:

now - ((now /samp)::samp) => time birth;
<<<(birth - 2::second) /2::second>>>;

I was worried... :)

-mike

Of course, you could just approximate this functionality by having this line run the moment the vm starts:

now => time vmstart;

Then, you'd be able to the do everything relative to that time. At least, that's how I would solve it.

Maybe you'll like my attempt above too.... well, I think it works....

Kas.

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