Re: PRI_stime

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>]

On 20/10/15 09:34, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 20.10.15 at 10:10, <George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 7:26 AM, Jan Beulich <JBeulich@suse.com> wrote:
>>> George, Dario,
>>>
>>> it being mostly used in scheduler code, and me considering it quite a
>>> bit easier to compare such big numbers when shown in hex I wonder:
>>> Do you prefer this to stay PRId64, or would you accept it to be
>>> changed to PRIx64 (allowing it to be used in a few other places)?
>> Personally I've never taken the time to familiarize myself with the
>> magnitude of hex numbers vs decimal numbers; so in the case of time, I
>> could easily see that 10000000 nanoseconds is about 1ms; but I don't
>> have a good sense of how long 0x1000000 nanoseconds is.  The fact that
>> our times are based on base 10 instead of base 2 is I think as good an
>> argument as any for leaving it as a decimal.
> Well, as long as the number of seconds the value represents is small,
> this indeed is a good argument for using dec. However, already
> when we get into the hour range we're talking about 12-digit values
> without any separators, and at least for me this means counting
> from either end to find a place where to put a mental separator. So
> if staying with dec, perhaps we should make these second based,
> i.e. <ssss>.<nnnnnnnnn>?

Having a custom %p for this would be very useful.

As for the original hex vs dec question, I am really not fussed, so long
as we are consistent (which is not the case currently).

~Andrew