Book Image

Getting Started with Julia

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Getting Started with Julia

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Getting Started with Julia
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
The Rationale for Julia
Index

Dates and times


To get the basic time information, you can use the time() function that returns, for example, 1.408719961424e9, the number of seconds since a predefined date called the epoch (normally, the 1st of January 1970 on Unix system), This is useful for measuring the time interval between two events, for example, to benchmark how long a long calculation takes:

start_time = time()
# long computation
time_elapsed = time() - start_time
println("Time elapsed: $time_elapsed")

Most useful function is strftime(time()) that returns a string in "22/08/2014 17:06:13" format.

If you want more functionality greater than equal to 0.3 when working in Julia, take a look at the Dates package. Add this to the environment with Pkg.add("Dates") (it provides a subset of the functionality of the Dates module mentioned next). There is also the Time package by Quinn Jones. Take a look at the docs to see how to use it (https://github.com/quinnj/Datetime.jl/wiki/Datetime-Manual).

Starting from Julia Version...