Re: clock(3) man page: precision vs accuracy

["Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

On 09/12/2014 05:08 AM, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/clock.3.html contains:
> 
>        In glibc 2.17 and earlier, clock() was implemented on top of
>        times(2).  For improved precision, since glibc 2.18, it is
>                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>        implemented on top of clock_gettime(2) (using the
>        CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID clock).
> 
> This looks strange. The user doesn't seek improved precision, but
> improved accuracy: if one gets more digits but the value itself is
> less accurate (i.e. the error against the ideal value is larger),
> this is bad. Perhaps changing "precision" to "accuracy" would be
> correct (I assume that the real goal of the change was not just
> improved precision, but more importantly the resulting improved
> accuracy). I've reported a bug about the glibc documentation:
> 
>   https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17383

It looks to me like your supposition is correct, Vincent.
I have changed "precision" to "accuracy".

Cheers,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
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