WhatIsTime

We have to distinguish three kinds of time, when reasoning about global interpreters sharing subspaces (as with Askemos):

real time

real time is what we understand as the current date. is a hypothetical thing. In reality only a clock approximately synchronised to a universal time base is possible.

node time

is whatever the clock the machine yields. Nodes need a reasonable synchronised clock, therefore NTP-synchronisation is among the SystemRequirements. Node time is available from SRFI-19 current-time and current-date. Note:node time is not useful for time values stored during transactions. Use virtual time for that!

process time

is the time at which a transaction (see ProcessStep) appears to be performed. It is attached to each message and agreed upon the quorum. (Similar to "official" processes, which often depend of the postmark for time measuerment.) To access the virtual time from NameSpaceDSSSL use (msg 'dc-date).